"Diaspora Writes to Her New Home"
A Conversation with Yesika Salgado
It was November 2022. I had given birth to a baby son that spring, my body and I were learning a lot about grief and the way it stores itself in the body. Postpartum depression kept sleep away, I was up late scrolling through Instagram in and out of myself when I stumbled onto a poem without a title that Yesika Salgado shared on her instagram account:
Reading this poem I felt like warm milk and sugar, like lavender and crystals. I felt like coming home to myself, like the divine magic of the Universe — not the algorithm placed it on my feed for me to read. I took a screenshot and saved it as my screensaver, where it stayed for almost a year. When I got the opportunity to speak with Yesika for La Cuenta it felt like the divine magic of the Universe once again and a full circle moment for me.
In this first part of our conversation, I speak with Yesika about writing poetry in Spanish and English and how the history of diaspora in our linage changes the way we seek home. Welcome to Part One: “Diaspora Writes to Her New Home,” titled after the first poem in Yesika’s poetry collection, Hermosa.
CHRISTIÁN PEÑA: In your book Hermosa you beautifully merge your Salvadoran roots with your love for Los Angeles How do you navigate the dynamics of both identities?
YESIKA SALGADO: I mean, first of all, my experience as a US born Latina is very different and privileged, right? It’s a privilege to be able to complain about visiting El Salvador and not feeling Salvadoran enough, and growing up here and not feeling American enough, especially because I grew up in a gentrified neighborhood. It’s in my privilege as a citizen being able to visit my family’s home. Navigating both worlds almost became second nature to me. To code switch wherever I was. At school, by using my good English — what my dad called my “good English,” and being well-behaved and operating as a normal American kid or teenager. At home, I was Salvadoran and then I would visit El Salvador every summer as a kid.
CP: What was it like spending your summers in El Salvador as a kid?
YS: It was the best part of my year. It was a kind of freedom that you don’t experience growing up in LA, you know? Because it’s a big city and we were latchkey kids. My parents were very strict, they wouldn’t really let us hang out with the kids in the neighborhood, and we only could when they were away working. But in Salvador, we ran around with our cousins, we have our own terrenos out there so you could come and go freely, we went wherever they went. When I would go to Salvador, I wasn’t there as a tourist, I was there as someone coming home.
CP: You mentioned growing up witnessing the gentrification of your neighborhood. How has that experience shifted your perception of home, especially considering your background as the daughter of refugees?
YS: When I was younger this neighborhood was very different. There were a lot of Latino folks and Filipino folks and we all knew each other, all of the neighborhood kids played together. We ran this block, I felt like I owned this block and so losing that sense of belonging as I got older and really being aware of it during high school was difficult and confusing. Now as an adult my goal is to buy a home and people ask me, “Where do you want to buy a home?” I say Silver Lake but that sounds like a pipe dream because houses here cost over a million dollars. My thing is one, this is the neighborhood where I have always lived in and I don’t want to leave it and two my family got their roots here, where they were forced to dig up their roots from that civil war.
Both my mother and father did not want to come to the United States. My father experienced violence at the military’s hands, and my mother’s brothers had to leave because of the guerrilla. And, because my mother’s brothers left and were here in the US, my grandmother and my mother couldn’t fend for the household and money wasn’t enough, so my grandmother decided to send my mother to come to the US and work and send money back home even though she didn’t want to come here. So, I was raised with this reluctant feeling of having to leave home, the same feeling my parents felt. They always had this yearning to go back. They’d always say, “We’re going back.”
My father passed away and he said, “Your going to cremate me and bury me in El Salvador because I am going back home — if you don’t do that I’m going to come pull you by your feet.” So home has always been El Salvador. I was born being like, “This isn’t home.” Our house in LA is not home. Home is Salvador, where we own a house that was my grandmother’s and then my mother’s and someday it will be mine.
Home has always been El Salvador. I was born being like, “This isn’t home.” Our house in LA is not home. Home is Salvador.
CP: My experience has been very similar in that I know where home is, even though I can’t visit, or go back, and having to create my own version of being at home in this world and within the diaspora.
YS: Yeah, that was my experience growing up but its in my privilege as a citizen here. It’s tricky because you’re not aware of that privilege when you’re younger and getting sent back every summer.
CP: When writing poetry, how do you navigate the choice between Spanish and English, or a combination of both? I feel like there is a distinct passion in certain Spanish words that might not translate as effectively into English — how do you approach that challenge?
YS: Honestly, I don’t think it’s something cerebral. I think it’s something instinctive. I wasn’t raised speaking Spanglish — mixing English and Spanish. My dad was really against that. He used to say, “You’re going to speak them both. You’re going to speak them both correctly.” That was his own stuff, whatever it was that he was dealing with that he had such an aversion to Spanglish, and he engrained that in my sisters and I.
So when I started writing in Spanglish, it felt forced. It felt unnatural. And then I think once I let that go and listened to how I feel — it became a tool that I could use in my writing and in my poetry. My poem, Tesoro, is completely bilingual, that alternates between lines, and that was on purpose. I wrote it when I first began performing poetry in spaces that lacked Latine voices. So I found myself explaining a lot of the language or my language was perceived as this “cool thing to throw in.”
And so I think I was outgrowing the separation of the two because when you’re bilingual you don’t always exist in one language completely. You speak another language that has words for what you’re feeling. My social language is English, but my comfort language is Spanish because that’s my home.
CP: Wow, that’s beautiful I love that, the Spanish language as the comfort language, as home.
Propina
We’ll be back with the second part of Christián’s conversation with Yesika Salgado. If you are interested in any of Yesika’s books of poetry, they are available through her website or from your local bookshop.
California educators: next week La Cuenta co-founders Alix Dick and Antero Garcia are hosting a workshop as part of UC Irvine Writing Project’s Annual Literacy Conference:
If you happen to be local, come say hello.
We’ll see you next week!
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