- Olivia Brooks
- Sep 22
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 23
Tsunami: Women’s Voices from Mexico
by Sophia Ziemer | edited by Gabriela Jauregui & Heather Cleary
Navigating ways of knowing and forms of being, Tsunami explores how voices from Mexico consider language, constructions of history, motherhood, violence, queerness, and more. Through an overarching concept of identity, Tsunami engages with different voices and their feminist perspectives on the topics, with strong purposeful political implications.
Originally published in Spanish, the editors worked carefully with a group of translators to publish the English translation of Tsunami: Women’s Voices from Mexico–a collection of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and even manifestos to explore the present through the past. Marginalized identities move through the world differently, and Tsunami aims to show specifically how these movements become affected by, while also acting as constructions of, our surroundings. Constructions of memory are at the heart of these works, where an array of intersectional identities use varied genres of writing to share their stories.
With numerous accolades, such as recognition from National Book Foundation, Heather Cleary is an award winning translator and instructor at Sarah Lawrence College who also coauthored and published The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Gabriela Jauregui serves as both coeditor and contributor to Tsunami. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from USC, an MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside, and an MA in critical theory from UC Irvine and is a Soros New American Fellow and a Borchard Fellow. With an array of poetry publications–Many Fiestas, Leash Seeks Lost Bitch, and Controlled Decay, and La memoria de las cosas–she coauthored the original Tsunami published in Spanish and was selected as Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 best young authors in Latin America, currently teaching at National Autonomous University in Mexico (UNAM).
Contributions range from all disciplines and backgrounds, with work by acclaimed authors Marina Azahua, Valeria Luiselli, Sara Uribe, Jumko Ogata, Daniela Rea (journalist), to artists like Diana J. Torres and Ytzel Maya, and more disciplinary-focused work by scholars Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (linguist) and Brenda Navarro (sociologist), along with other voices to be encountered, like the Zapatista Army for National Liberation. All these contributors focus their work at the intersection of their Mexican identities and other lived experiences and select chapters from the book focus on substantial moments for each contributor.
The embracing of indigeneity offers alternate viewpoints to Eurocentric feminism. Yet, at the heart of all feminisms is intersectionality. Lia Garcia, La Novia Sirena (The Mermaid Bride) explicates the weaving of identities in “To Sea Change: Metaphors of Trans Pain.” Vivid symbolism is used to describe the multilayered experience of queerness, noting the intricate resemblance of the ocean to the queer experience–extremely lively and endlessly fluid. Though Mexico is “at war” with trans women, this piece serves as a comforting reminder that representation will remain and trans women can never cease to exist. Even then, the water will always hold the truth. To reminisce on the loss of trans siblings is an aching yet powerful act of tenderness and vulnerability.
Another piece, “Feminism Without a Room of One’s Own” looks to challenge Virginia Woolf’s original idea, exploring the theorization of women who challenge hegemony from the inside, even if they may not have a room of their own. This essay doesn’t necessarily fight cultural assumptions of domesticity, but encourages women to challenge the status quo. Through the embracement of mother tongues, internal battles with husbands who hold different viewpoints, we see Dahlia de la Cerda providing meta-context to the Mexican feminist identity. Rhetorical moves like historical backgrounds encourage the idea that not all women have a room of one’s own; not all women can or will learn feminist Mexican histories in the same way; not all women have the opportunity to experience a feminist positionality. This is further elaborated through explorations of personal intersectionality, questioning canonical feminism versus radical feminism via identity politics, female friendships, and maternal instincts. White feminism is liberating… but de la Cerda argues for the utterly complicated explicit embracing of a new feminism which has yet to be concretely established.
Though not all contributions can be highlighted, each piece offers a different nuanced perspective on Mexican identities, feminism, and what it means to challenge notions of womanhood. Each genre is curated bi-focally–that is, for readers who want to learn more about internalized emotions and potential struggles of Latinidad, or for readers with a similar experience, to find solidarity in evocative writing. This genre-bending text may bring up different emotions for the individual, yet that seems to be its goal. Not everyone will resonate with some of the poetry or prose, and not all will agree with some of the arguments made throughout the essays. This strong implication creates metacommentary because we all experience feminism differently. It never has been and never will be a “one-size-fits-all” idea. We all enact feminism in ways that make sense to us, and Tsunami shows how these different voices engage with such an objectively intricate yet internally subjective concept.
Most importantly, this text functions through a very different context if compared to Eurocentric or Americanized notions, or if compared to hegemonic feminism. Tsunami provides both familiar and new perspectives on intergenerational understandings of feminism, weaving an intricate yet accessible novel for readers who wish to learn more about what it means to work through understandings of feminism through perspectives on maternity, violence, queerness, indigeneity, and the patriarchal structures of Mexico.
GABRIELA JAUREGUI is the author of the novel Feral, the poetry collections Many Fiestas, Leash Seeks Lost Bitch, and Controlled Decay, and the short story collection La memoria de las cosas. She edited and coauthored two essay collections, Tsunami and Tsunami 2, published in Spanish in 2018 and 2021 respectively. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from USC, an MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside, and an MA in critical theory from UC Irvine. She is a Soros New American Fellow and a Borchard Fellow, and was selected as part of the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 best young authors in Latin America. She is cofounder of the Aura Estrada Prize for young women writers and teaches at the National Autonomous University in Mexico (UNAM).
HEATHER CLEARY is an award-winning translator of poetry and prose whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the National Book Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction.
SOPHIA ZIEMER is a PhD student in the English Department at Florida State University, where she also earned her MA in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research is centered on cultural rhetorics, with a particular interest in intersectional identities. She recently coauthored an article titled, “¡A Quemar los Años Viejos! Generational and Transnational Reflections on Ecuador’s End-of-Year Celebrations,” published in the Journal of Festival Culture Inquiry and Analysis. Her work currently explores spaces as cultural networks that both converge and diverge socially enacted identities.