Erika L. Sánchez is one of the leading lights of the robust Latinx poetry scene in Chicago.
She was born in 1983 in the western suburb of Cicero to Mexican immigrant Parents. She has two brothers and they all grew up speaking both Spanish and English at home. She attended Morton East High School and then the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. After college she traveled to Madrid, Spain, to teach English with the Fulbright program and pursued poetry. She then earned an MFA in poetry from the University of New Mexico.
Sánchez won a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship in 2015. Her first poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017. The Washington Post named it to a list of best poetry of July 2017, calling it a “fierce, assertive debut”. In The New York Times, Kathleen Rooney praised Sánchez’s “wrenching explorations of guilt and shame, grief and misogyny...Her depictions of misery hurt and haunt.” The same year, United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith recommended Sánchez as among the best new voices in poetry.
Sánchez’s acclaimed young adult novel was I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. It follows 15-year-old Julia Reyes who first struggles to live up to the rule-following example set by her sister Olga, then begins to learn things were not as they seemed when Olga dies unexpectedly. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for young people’s literature and It also won the 2018 Tomás Rivera Award.
Her next book, a memoir, Crying in the Bathroom, was a wrenchingly honest look at her difficult decision to seek an abortion and how the pregnancy, paired with debilitating depression, made her feel suicidal.
I will never pretend my abortion was easy. It was, without a doubt, the worst experience of my life but I believe the procedure saved me.
She was a professor at DePaul University.
A Mexican Police woman marks the shell casing left by a hail of automatic weapon fire at a murder scene in Juarez, a border town that had more than 400 killings last year.
In today poem, The Kingdom of Debt is typically brutally honest about the tsunami of murder in Mexico in recent year. Victims include those caught up in deadly drug and gang wars, workers in the maquila factories near the border, those caught up in simmering rebellions like Chiapas, refugees making the long trek from Central America to the U.S. border, and has now even touched foreign tourists in supposedly safe vacation destination enclaves. And women, especially women.
Sexual violence is rampant and has spread from Mexico City, other urban areas, and the border zone to once-safe traditional villages with strong family values where women were respected and honored.
On International Women’s Day in 2020 over a million women swarmed the streets of the Capitol dramatically protesting the misogynistic violence.
The Kingdom of Debt
According to a report from the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico
project, 138,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since 2006.
They call it the corner of heaven:
a laboratory, a foot at the throat
of an empire. Before the holy
dirt, the woman with the feline gait
waits with tangled hair, mouth
agape — the letter X marked
on what’s left of her breasts
and face. Nuestra Belleza
Mexicana. A roped mule
watches a man place a crown
on her severed head. Tomorrow
the queen will be picked clean
by the kindness of the sea.
Shuttered shops and empty
restaurants. Stray dogs couple
in a courtyard. Under a swaying
palm tree, a cluster of men
finger golden pistols, whisper,
aquí ni se paran las moscas.
Two boys, transfixed, watch
a pixelated video: a family fed
to a swarm of insatiable pigs.
A butcher sweeps blood
from an empty street. Death
is my godmother, he repeats.
Death is a burnt mirror.
When the crackling stereo
dithers between stations — amor
de mis amores, sangre de mi alma —
a gaggle of silent children
gather before a sputtering
trash bin. Together they watch
the terror hover like flies.
—Erika L. Sánchez
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