Event Details

Xini queity nyaga? Dizhsa poetry as cultural and linguistic resistance

The Linguistics Department and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese invite all to a poetry reading by Felipe H. Lopez (Seton Hall University).

Dr. Lopez is a teacher, poet, and writer of the indigenous language Zapotec. He will share his poetry and reflections on being a Zapotec poet:

Writing Dizhsa (San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec) poetry, for me, is a self-determined initiative to express my identity in form, process, and content. My poetry is both language preservation and cultural resistance. Becoming a Zapotec writer has meant navigating multiple layers of challenges, including ideologies that restrict what Native poetry "should be about" and having to create an orthography. Most Indigenous Mexican poets also practice self-translation, as do I, and are writing for a readership that is still nascent. In this talk, I will read several of my poems in Dizhsa and share not only the cultural context of the poetry, including the life of a Zapotec migrant in Los Angeles, but also reflect on the realities of Zapotec language activism through poetry.