This podcast explores the Spanish-language dedication poems of nineteenth-century Latinas who exchanged verses in and across the borders of the United States. These verses stage conversations that tease out definitions of femininity and creative expression between women in the public space of the Spanish-language press, and thus before an audience of silent, male interlocutors. Sarah Skillen discusses the Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and her 1846 poem “Contestando a otro de una señorita” [“Ballad Answering Another by a Young Lady”]. She and Vanessa Ovalle Perez then turn to an exchange of dedicatorias between the Panamanian poet Amelia Denis and San Francisco poet Carlota Gutierrez, which was printed from 1875 through 1876 in San Salvador and Los Angeles. Of particular interest is how these women participated in a growing, transnational network of poetisas writing to and for one other.

This podcast also includes readings of these nineteenth-century dedicatorias in Spanish and in translation, performed respectively by the contemporary poets Liana Bravo, Lucy Cristina Chau, and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. These readings are mobilized as a collaboration and performative dialogue between Latinas of past and present and between languages, Spanish and English. Episode produced by Vanessa Ovalle Perez, Sarah Skillen, Christine “Xine” Yao, and Matthew Teutsch.

These poems in the original Spanish and translations by Perez and Skillen will be made available on the C19 website