Poet Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead (Libro centroamericano
de los muertos), winner of the 2018 Premio Aguascalientes, Mexico's highest poetry
honor, is a sequence of poems in multiple voices, interwoven with the author's own
narrative, about Central American migrants and refugees, living and dead, journeying
through Mexico to the north. The book also interweaves altered passages from A Brief
Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish
colonist (later friar and bishop) who became the first and fiercest critic of Spanish
colonialism in the New World and the enslavement of indigenous people.
The work's importance has already been well recognized in Mexico. For readers
in the U.S. and the English-speaking world, it draws a compelling portrait of one of the
most critical stories of our time, in poems of great formal variety and lyrical depth: the
massive migration of Central Americans fleeing terror, crime, and extreme poverty, and
the persecution and danger they face in traveling through Mexico to the United States.
The book is divided into five sections, for the five main countries of origin in this
migration: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico itself. Each section
contains portraits of migrants; first-person testimonies of the dead, often titled by the
precise locations where their bodies may be found; and poems that deploy varied
sources, including news stories and political and scientific reports, to give fuller context
to the human tales. The beginning and end of the book, and each of its five sections, are
framed by what Rodrigo calls a palimpsest: his altered passages from Bartolomé de las
Casas' classic cry of protest, situating the work within a broader Latin American story.
Poems from the English translation of Libro centroamericano have appeared in
Asymptote, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry International.