For those of us with roots in Latin America, Diego Báez’s debut poetry collection, Yaguareté White (University of Arizona Press, 2024), cuts to the bone. His puckish sense of humor allows us to laugh at the brutal colonial history and the ignorance that continues to shadow our complex cultural identities.
Báez, the son of a Paraguayan father and a white, Pennsylvanian mother, grew up in central Illinois in a community devoid of families that resembled his own. He was the brown kid whose complexion betrayed his otherness to his classmates. On family visits to Paraguay, Báez’s broken Spanish—the language of the colonizers—and Guaraní—the indigenous people’s idiom—ironically marked him as a gringo.
This constant reminder that he was not quite from Paraguay nor from the United States propels Báez’s poems. He expertly weaves colonial history, US-born bigotries, and the three languages that both taunt and, paradoxically, give succor. Yaguareté White is vividly revelatory as Báez dissects his Paraguayan American identity to explore, with loving ruthlessness, the beauty, humor, and dreadfulness of his tripartite identity.
Diego Báez lives in Chicago, where he works as an assistant professor of multidisciplinary studies at City Colleges, teaching poetry, English composition, and first-year seminars. Yaguareté White was a finalist for the Georgia Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the Berkshire Prize for Poetry. Báez has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Báez via email about his poetic approach to a complicated cultural identity—including the meaning of whiteness—and the road to publishing his debut collection.
***
The Rumpus: In the foreword to Yaguareté White, Rigoberto González, the University of Arizona Press Camino del Sol series editor, notes that you are the “first Paraguayan American poet to publish a book originally in English in the United States” and that you are therefore “in a unique position to pave an important path into a nation and culture that have not received the same level of regard in American letters as its neighboring South American countries and cultures.” Did you consider this fact when your debut collection was accepted for publication? What do you think of your “unique position”?
Diego Báez: I consider myself fortunate to assist in building inroads, so to speak, into Paraguay through my uniquely American—and United States-ian—experiences and perspective. I hadn’t previously considered the phrasing, but “paving a path” suggests poetic infrastructure or development in a way that makes me uncomfortable but that also echoes the actual transit from Asunción to my father’s village, as the slim highway pavement erodes to rocky cobblestone that gives way to red orange clay worn into grooves by burro and auto alike. An early poem in the book, “What Has Gone Before,” attempts to relate this experience to readers. It’s a memory that’s so emblematic of every visit to my abuelos’ farm outside Villarrica, one I hope frames the book’s poetic trajectory.
If I’m the first to bring English to Paraguayan American poetry, I follow in the footsteps of Paraguayan writers like Miguelángel Meza, Susy Delgado, Damián Cabrera, Alba Eiragi Duarte, and Alberto Luna, whose work is made accessible to me through the diligent, adept work of translators like Elisa Taber (author also of An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country), Susan Smith Nash, Tracy K. Lewis, and Ron Haldyna. I would also like to give a shout-out here to C. E. Wallace, author of Juego de Palabras. So, while mine may be a unique position, I’m certainly not alone.
Rumpus: Could you describe the process of writing this, your debut collection?
Báez: I can trace the origin of Yaguareté White way back to grad school. I called my thesis “The Blue and Brown Books” because a friend had turned me on to Wittgenstein, and I thought it a convenient way to organize what I saw as two opposing poetic interests: wordplay and language games heavily invested in irony and intellectualizing—blue—paired with poems related to my racial, ethnic, and cultural identities—brown. Over the intervening decade, many kind people whose opinions I trust convinced me to departition the two ideas. This completely changed the poems’ composition as well as their interplay within the container of the collection.
Not to mention, significant events unfolded between graduation and publication: I started teaching and got married. No doubt most notably, my wife and I welcomed our child into our lives. As a direct result of that lives-altering event, I’ve been thinking a lot about the bidirectionality of inheritance: how each generation draws from their antecedents, but also how the legacies of our ancestors change as a result of our actions and behaviors, what we put into the world. I’m acutely conscious that my book will serve as a record of sorts, if imperfect, of the lives that I and my family have lived. I could not have written my book, could not live this life, without my child inside it. I wonder, what else have I taken from her? What else will I give?
Rumpus: You divide your book into three sections: “Peteĩ,” “Mokõi,” and “Mbohapy.” These titles simply translate from Guaraní to English as “one,” “two,” and “three.” What was your process in deciding which poems went into each of the three sections?
Báez: One goal for the book is to mimic or recreate the process of language acquisition in the absence of rigorous formal or even familial instruction. Call it didactic, but one goal of the section titles is to reinforce learning across the book, which I hope to achieve also by numbering the “joke poems” (“pukarã”) and by quoting Paraguayan children counting in another poem, “So You Want to Write in Guaraní.” If readers don’t pick up on it right away, at least that referential trifecta remains.
As for the content of each section, I knew I wanted to open with a recreation of what it’s like to fly from the States to Paraguay, drive then to Villarrica, and arrive at a place that feels uncannily like home. I knew also that I wanted to confront the violence of militant whiteness, which arrives maybe two-thirds into the collection. And I wanted to conclude on a more hopeful or optimistic note, which is why the book winds back down with a more favorable look forward to the future.
Rumpus: What was the road to publication with the University of Arizona Press like?
Báez: Everyone at University of Arizona Press has been absolutely lovely. It’s a dream to be included in the Camino del Sol series.
One thing I wasn’t expecting, as a first-time author, was the scrutiny and care involved in the copyediting process. I was surprised because it’s poetry, so it won’t always adhere to the strictures of what any style guide declares to be standard English. The talented copyeditor’s keen eye and close attention to detail forced me to think intentionally about even the smallest of choices. For example, the book is preoccupied with family and lineage, but ambient elements of Guaraní cosmology and celestial jaguars radiate in its atmosphere. I had to think carefully about words like “ascendent/ascendant” and “descendent/descendant,” and the question of whether to emphasize astrology or genealogy.
Another minor detail that required outsized attention was the spelling of “whiskey,” since the issue of alcohol connects with the book’s larger concerns about personal, familial, and cultural lineages. I didn’t realize this, but “whiskey” (with an E) and “whisky” (without) are different beverages altogether. Apparently, only whiskeys distilled in the US and Ireland use the E whereas those distilled in Scotland or Japan do not. So I had to think about what kind of man the father is in this infinitesimally tiny sense. These funny conundrums mirror the linguistic concerns of the book, where “the difference / between food and small penis in Guaraní is literally two / short syllables,” as one of the book’s so-called “postcard” poems has it.
Incidentally, the copyeditor is also a visual artist, and she shared an example of her collage artwork. It happened to repurpose an image created by Alan Berry Rhys, the Argentine artist who also did the cover artwork for my book. I couldn’t believe the serendipity!
Rumpus: Many of your poems—indeed, the very title of your book—address, confront, and sometimes wrestle with the concept of whiteness. What is whiteness to you?
Báez: I have two responses to that. The first is a sociological response. In grad school, I read from The Invention of the White Race by Theodore Allen for Dr. Barb Foley’s Marxist literature class (as I’ve written about elsewhere). Allen argues that the ruling class sought to marshal roving bands of European workers into a consolidated racial category of “whiteness,” an identity to be deployed against fellow workers “of color.” Whiteness, in this formulation, inherently pits people against one another based on made-up bullshit, which hurts everyone save the ruling class. From that perspective, whiteness can only be a divisive and destructive identity, designed to undermine class solidarity. It always has been.
My second definition must be informed by the ways I personally have experienced whiteness, which range from the diasporic—I didn’t grow up with a Spanish-speaking community—to confusing—if not “White Non-Hispanic” on my standardized test, then what?—to disproportionately advantageous. How many Americans have both parents complete their bachelor’s degrees? How many people attend the exact same college their parents did? What racial categories correspond most often to both of the above? It’s difficult to disentangle these observations from the other forms of privilege I enjoy and endure as a relatively tall, thirtysomething, cishet man. It feels, at best, inaccurate to deny that part of my identity. At worst, it’s disingenuous. That said, I think a lot about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s phrasing in Between the World and Me, where he refers to “people who believe themselves to be white.” That haunts me because I think it’s so profoundly true: white people don’t need to invest themselves in their racial identity as a point of pride. Why not relinquish that, be freed of that burden, in order to better account for the wrongs and injustices of the past and present?
Of course, the book deals with whiteness in other ways, through a variety of speakers, some of whom are closely aligned to my experiences. Others are quite distant.
Rumpus: The colonial history of Paraguay is ever-present in these poems. Did you learn that history as a young child, or was it something that you encountered as an adult?
Báez: The history of Paraguay is characterized by a geography altered by outsiders, one constantly in flux: the country’s borders have expanded, receded, closed, and reopened. By far and away, the greatest, simplest, most confounding geography lesson I ever received was from my father. When I was a kid, I asked why he decided to come to America. His response: “I was born in America.” The ease with which this sweeping assertion obliterates the arbitrary nature of national borders has always stuck with me.
The colonial history of Paraguay is not a burning topic of urgent concern inside the public school classrooms of Central Illinois, nor is it particularly pressing in Bloomington’s only institution of higher education. It was the Internet and time that taught me to appreciate the country’s uniquely, repeatedly fucked position in Southern Cone history. It’s complicated. Textbooks will call Paraguay’s militant failures largely self-imposed, but that presupposes a national self. The dictators didn’t impose shit on themselves. Stroessner didn’t suffer under his rule, the asshole—the peoples of Paraguay did. How then to relate that via poetry? How then to reshape a condition too-often labeled complacency of the people into a new understanding of survival by kinship, as Shawn Michael Austin has posited?
In reality, US imperialist interests have also intervened in ways detrimental to the self-determination of the peoples of South America. I have to question my own complicity in this history, as I extend my English into the poetic terrain of Paraguay, “not meaning / to re-enact anything, unable to help it,” as one poem from the book suggests.
Rumpus: Several of your poems are postcards that are “[b]orrowed from bloggers who post about their visits to Paraguay.” The ignorance expressed by the bloggers is both funny and frustrating. Could you talk about the creation of these poems and how they developed into a series?
Báez: I think you’ve touched on a key element of the book: the fact that ignorance can be both funny and frustrating. Yaguareté White is defined by speakers who are uncertain, uncomfortable, or confused about their own identities, how best to relate to them, and what it means to translate experiences across continents and cultures. Humor and self-deprecation can impose an ironizing distance, but at what cost? I hope my poems navigate the tightrope walk between authenticity and fraudulence without appearing flip or disinterested.
For the postcard poems themselves, I started by googling people who had visited Paraguay. The resulting blogs were almost always maintained by well-meaning white folks who wound up in remote parts of Paraguay courtesy of a governmental or religious organization. They often had the wildest takes on the country, which were frequently xenophobic or dismissive (“I wouldn’t have chosen Paraguay / myself”).
That said, bloggers also write about things I don’t experience myself, which introduces perspectival and narratological wrinkles that I find interesting, problematic, and worthy of unearthing. For example, one of the postcards relates a social gathering that includes an atrocious, racist performance. That’s not something I’ve ever witnessed, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It almost certainly does. Delivering that story in a voice that readers may easily discredit or write-off raises questions about who is considered a reliable source of information about a country that may feel like home but cannot be called one’s own.
Rumpus: Turning to your identity as a writer, when did you realize that you were, in fact, a writer? What did your family and friends think about this?
Báez: In kindergarten, I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist because dinosaurs rock and I could spell the word “archaeologist.” That, right there, should’ve been my first clue.
In fact, one of my earliest memories is playing a spelling game on my Grandpa Jack’s lap in front of what must have been one of the first computers available for consumer purchase. I wasn’t interested in taking the PC apart, as was my younger brother, Armando, or competing to top the high score, as was my youngest brother, Miguel. I was interested in the cyan and magenta of the cathode ray tube, the bright pixelations of letters in need of rearrangement.
My grandma and grandpa (my mom’s parents) have always been especially encouraging of my artistic pursuits, and Grandpa Jack appears in a couple of poems, “the wartime rose on his forearm / fading to a dark blur, flesh burnt into service.”
Rumpus: How would you describe your identity as an educator? How does that identity intersect with your roles as a writer and abolitionist?
Báez: In Chicago, I’ve been genuinely blessed to work with students from all over the world. It’s incredible. I teach in the Uptown neighborhood, which boasts a wildly diverse demographic jambalaya. The students work hard to overcome barriers most people cannot fathom just to show up for class. I’m grateful, not just because the students are so deserving of quality instruction but because I learn from them every day. I wrote about successful approaches for balancing the diversity of identities and experiences that attends any urban, open-access institution for a chapter in Cultural Competence and Sensitivity in Adult Neurorehabilitation: A Personalized Community-based Rehabilitation Approach for Speech-Language Pathologists, forthcoming, Plural Publishing, which is not the kind of writing I usually do. In that way, too, I’m lucky. So if I were to choose an adjective to describe myself as an educator, it’s “fortunate.”
***
Author photograph courtesy of Diego Báez
