Críticas Magazine

Adriana V. Lopez

More U.S. Lit Journals Eyeing Latin America, thanks to Etiqueta Negra
March 21, 2008

I’ve spotted a trend here: Lit mags from north and south (America) coming together, sharing content, introducing their writers and visual artists to the other and forming a transnational reading community. Sounds corny, perhaps globalization-fed, but it’s actually sort of cool. It used to be that you had to wait for high brow journals like Bomb or The Paris Review to dedicate special issues or a few measly pieces by or about Spanish-language writers. Thankfully, there was always The Latin American Review, my long time favorite, but that came out too infrequently and tended to feature more mature and venerated writers from the canon.

What I see happening now is that burgeoning voices, both of fiction and non-fiction, especially from Latin America, are finding their way to the pages of indie publications alongside other progressive writers/editors like themselves, but from the north.  Thanks to that visionary and barrier-breaking team behind Peru’s Etiqueta Negra (Black Label), there’s a greater amount of fresher content without all the editorial formality and staleness of the past. It’s happening more organically, through advertising and talent bartering, guest-editorships, and email blasts to a group of global trotting friends (or more sedentary types who prefer to travel in front of their computer).

EN has been behind not one, not two, but three literary mags’ impetus to feature Latin America somehow. Nice work. First it was A Public Space, then the Virginia Quarterly, and most recently n+1 that has taken the council of those Peruvians out to proselytize some of Latin America’s finest. It’s hard for journals both north and south, to get the word out on what they’re doing with so much other info inundating our inboxes. It’s important to team up with fellow publications for networking and content ideas because as we well know, two (or three), is more powerful than one.

Daniel Alarcon, Peruvian-American author of Lost City Radio and Etiqueta Negra’s associate editor, recently sent out an email blast announcing that the Virginia Quarterly’s special issue "South America in the 21st Century," produced in collaboration with EN, is a finalist for two National Magazine Awards: for Best Single Topic Issue, and General Excellence. The issue, published last fall, includes work from Julio Villanueva Chang, EN's founding editor, Toño Angulo, former EN managing editor, Daniel Titinger, the current editor-in-chief, Gabriela Wiener, their Barcelona correspondent, Liniers, a regular EN contributor, along with the work of a dozen other writers, artists, photographers, translators, and poets from all over Latin American and the United States.The upside of a border getting more and more ambiguous is that it benefits our literatures. We’re together, speaking the same language, sometimes, but still relishing in the differences.

 
For more South meets North (and the other way around), check out these journals, too:

A Public Space: Issue 3
This issue has a section dedicated to Peru and features the writings of Alarcon, Santiago Roncagliolo, Julio Durán and others.

 n+1
Thanks to good ol’ fashioned high-minded camaraderie with their hermanos down in Lima, the n+1 editors offered temporary shelter in cyberspace to some of EN’s recent articles.

Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on March 21, 2008 | Comments (0)