From Veronica Melendez’s “Iconic” series.

Melendez has been featured in venues such as Remezcla, Mitu, and NPR’s Alt Latino for casting light on Central American artistic production in the D.C. metropolitan area––​or, in shorthand, “the D.M.V.,” the acronym for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. ​

She is co-founder of La Horchata Zine, a seasonal publication printed and bound in Washington, D.C., which promotes Central American artists. 

Melendez’s communal forms of artistic production are also evinced through her pop culture sensibility. Her digital illustrations project––entitled “Iconic”––is informed by the familiar logos, graphic representation, and typography that bring Latin American staples to life.

The food brands one may find recognizable in coffee, black beans, or even arepa flour, take us, under her artistic vision, to a new form of communication––a new visual landscape of Central American and LatinX creation.

Her series “Le pido a Dios que no me olviden”––or, “I Ask God They Don’t Forget Me”––won the 2018 Award for Documentarians of The American South. This prize is conferred by the Archive of Documentary Arts, part of Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which now houses Melendez’s color inkjet prints.

Zoe Litaker Photography.

Her visuality juxtaposes Central American everyday lives at the center––and at the margins––of power, their displacement under gentrification, and their invisible labor.

Melendez exposes underexamined questions on how Central Americans in D.C., which is generally conceptualized as a “northern city,” also fall under the “Nuevo South” framework and its sociocultural dynamics––ushering in important contexts about the remaking of place and diaspora.

​In this segment, Melendez speaks of growing up in Wheaton, Maryland, which her white classmates dubbed “Little Mexico,” even though there is not much of Mexican population in that part of the state, since “it’s mostly Salvadoran and Guatemalan.”

Growing up in this “Salvadoran-Guatemalan bubble,” she adds, didn’t really lead to an otherization of her Central Americanness, and by extension, her LatinXness. Wheaton was also a place where you would find a noticeable Central American middle class as well as homeowners.

These kinds of experiences led to her arts trajectory and her desire to visually record a Central American community that was not being documented enough in the art world, especially given the strong presence of these migrants in the D.M.V.

Melendez’s venture into the zine world was her way of “almost sticking it to the art school world,” she notes.

“I definitely feel like all the rules and the strict structure of ‘this is what you’re supposed to do and this is what you’re not supposed to do in a printed publication form’ kind of go out the window with the zine.”

This mini-magazine’s flexible format makes La Horchata more approachable and appealing. It allows for more Central Americans creatives to share their work, not just from the D.M.V. but also from other geographies where one doesn’t typically expect to find them.

From Veronica Melendez’s “Iconic” series.

Melendez’s artistic practice is a way to “find other people, like us, out there, because I knew we had to exist.”

“It couldn’t just be a handful of Central American creatives that I knew in D.C. There had to be more us. And just creating this little, kind of humble, publication has really created this platform for everyone to find each other and build a sense of community, even if it’s just via the Internet and a zine.”

Melendez studied abroad at the Glasgow School of Art, earned her B.F.A. in Photojournalism from the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design as well as an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of Hartford. 

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“Podcasts from the South” ​are a series of conversations ​​created ​and hosted by María DeGuzmán at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Claudia Milian at Duke University.

Zoe Litaker Photography.

Special thanks to Fernando Rocha and Compare Foods on Avondale Drive in Durham, N.C. for making us feel welcome and generously allowing us to photograph in this space.

Elizondo Griest is also Assistant Professor and Margaret R. Shuping Fellow of Creative Nonfiction at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of three memoirs: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands.

Topics under discussion range from the boundaries of the United States North and South, Canada and Mexico, and in-between-ness, to South Texas and environmental justice.

Elizondo Griest takes us to the key aspect of her biographical formation: Corpus Christi, Texas, a city that spurred her nomadic inclinations and destinations.

“My whole life I always knew that I wanted to wander. I wanted to travel,” she says. “I wanted to go far and I wanted to go wide. The only question for me was just how, where, and with whose money? Really.”

Her writing, she adds, “is a reflection of what it means when an international borderline cuts right through you.” Her narrative form takes on a particular fusion that simultaneously advances her literary form.

I fuse everything, don’t I? I am biracial, bicultural, bilingual. And I also fuse form. So all three of my books are written in a fusion of a literary journalism, travel writing, and memoir writing. And it’s pretty evenly split, I would say, between the three. That, to me, is really a dynamic way of writing. That’s also just the way I increasingly process the world.

And, just as her latest nonfictional work turns to environmental degradation, urgency, and forms of survival and recovery, Elizondo Griest also speaks of learning about her ovarian cancer diagnosis during her 40-city book tour of All the Agents and Saints.

“I had a tumor the size of a basketball that had somehow grown off my left ovary,” she says. “That actually made me feel more connected to my community, because that is a narrative of so many people that I spent ten years of my life working with and being among. My colleges refer to it as random act of violence. But I don’t know how random it is when all of us are getting these cancers. . . . We’re not at the age where these diseases should be happening.”

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“Podcasts from the South” ​are a series of conversations ​​created ​and hosted by María DeGuzmán at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Claudia Milian at Duke University.

Zoe Litaker Photography.

This second podcast features Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Director of  the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Professor Mirabal is the author of Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823–1957, which is the focus for this session. How was the project of the Cuban nation narrated, imagined, and crafted not in Cuba, but the island of Manhattan?

She also probes questions such as what makes this particular history “unthinkable” and what makes freedom “unimaginable”? Professor Mirabal identifies three particular insights by which to gauge her scholarly study: Cubanidad as an intellectual and social project; intellectual producers, thinkers, writers; and revolutionary politics.

Tune into their conversation on Latino, Latina, LatinX diasporic politics, notions of hemispheric belonging, the role of the Spanish language, and the circulation of bodies between the United States and Cuba.

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“Podcasts from the South” ​are a series of conversations  ​​created ​and hosted by María DeGuzmán at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Claudia Milian at Duke University.  ​

Zoe Litaker Photography.

Zoe Litaker Photography.

The South’s distinctiveness, López tells the hosts, can be attributed to the dominant black-white racial binary that “refuses to reckon with the growing and influential Latina and Latino presence” and the stereotyping of this population in the region as an “immigrant, migrant, transient presence that does not require serious acknowledgment.” One could move about in Nashville, Tenn., López makes known, and not ever have to seriously engage with Latino and Latina individuals, despite their growing presence. These persons “are relegated to the margins of one’s life because of social strata.”

This exchange of ideas brings up questions of Southern Latino and Latina encounters: how to “enact and transact” with them and how to work through as well as engage in “important communication” with those relegated to the peripheries, as López points out.

And, of equal importance: how does one teach Latino and Latina Studies through Southern history and all that it implies? How do students analytically navigate the history of slavery, often paired with guilt and grief, only to add another layer that, at times, draws on other sources of grief through another racialized population like Latinos and Latinas?

The three interlocutors concur that the idea of the South––its narratives, the formation of Southern people––need to broadened so as to retell Southern stories through the Latino and Latina presence, the Southwest, as well as Latin American spaces.

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“Podcasts from the South” ​are a series of conversations ​​created ​and hosted by María DeGuzmán at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Claudia Milian at Duke University.

Zoe Litaker Photography.

Zoe Litaker Photography.