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Overview
The word tortillera means lesbian in Español. The moniker is familiar to most Spanish speaking cultures, but especially particular to the Cuban experience. In most Cuban-American households to be called a tortillera (whether one is one or not) is the gravest of insults, the basest of adjectives, a cat call that whips through the air like a lash whose only intention is to wound, to scar. Many a first-generation, Cubanita (the ones who are into other girls, anyway) has suffered, denied, wailed over the loaded term, but in Caridad Moro-Gronlier’s debut collection, Tortillera, she not only applies the term to herself, she owns it, drapes it over her shoulders and heralds her truth through candid, unflinching poems that address the queer experience of coming out while Cuban.
The first half of the book immediately plunges the reader into the speaker’s Cuban-American life on-the-hyphen through vivid, first person narratives that draw one in, making the reader privy to the moments that mold the speaker’s experience: marginalization at a teacher-parent conference; the socioeconomic distinctions at assorted Quinceañera celebrations; a walk down the aisle toward divorce amid a back drop of wedding registries and Phen-Phen fueled weight-loss; post-partum depression; a peek into a No-Tell motel that does tell of the affair she embarks upon with her first female lover; the agony of divorce vs. the headiness of sex and lust; the evolution of an identity in verse.
Part reckoning, part renewal, part redemption, part rebirth, the poems in Tortillera come clean, but more than that, they guide, reveal and examine larger considerations: the role of language on gender its subsequent roles, the heartrending consequences of compulsory heterosexuality, as well as the patriarchal stamp emblazoned on the Cuban diaspora. The work contained in Tortillera befits its audacious title—bold, original and utterly without shame.
...
from “Unpacking the Suitcase”
Once a year you watch West Side Story
on the screen of your parents’ 1974 Zenith
and catch a glimpse of yourself on television.
You are the first born gringa in the family.
Your English is perfect, but you’re not
like your friends. You don’t go to slumber parties
or play-dates, you don’t join the Brownies
or take ballet, but once a year you get to
live in Technicolor and root for the Sharks
because they speak Spanish, too.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781680032451 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas Review Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2021 |
| Series: | The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 118 |
| Sales rank: | 406,844 |
| File size: | 144 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
from “Unpacking the Suitcase” Once a year you watch West Side Story on the screen of your parents’ 1974 Zenith and catch a glimpse of yourself on television. You are the first born gringa in the family. Your English is perfect, but you’re not like your friends. You don’t go to slumber parties or play-dates, you don’t join the Brownies or take ballet, but once a year you get to live in Technicolor and root for the Sharks because they speak Spanish, too.
Table of Contents
Entry 1
I.
Unpacking the Suitcase 4
Analfabeta 9
Arbolito in el Exilio, 1979 11
Topography 12
Inheritance 13
Wet Foot, Dry Foot, 2002 14
What I Should Have Said, Instead 16
Compulsion: A Chronology 18
Puta 21
Quinceañera 23
What the White Girl Asked at Our 20th High School Reunion 25
II.
At Least I Didn't Rape You 28
Somnambulism 101: Never Wake a Talker 30
Cuban-American Lexicon 31
Visionware 33
What They Don't Tell You at the Baby Shower 34
Waiting to Be Discharged from the Maternity Ward 36
Fourth Quarter 37
Grilled 38
That Night at the Rack 'Em Room 39
At That Motel on 8th Street 41
Labor Day, 2003, Lincoln Road, Miami Beach 42
The Perfect Dress 44
Veteran's Day, 2005, Lincoln Road, Miami Beach 46
For My Lover, Returning to Her Husband 47
What You Learn at the Track 50
Doing Without 51
Like Finger Sandwiches for Sumo Wrestlers 52
Raisins in the Stuffing 54
Pruning Black-Eyed Susans on the Day of Our Divorce 55
Coming Out to Mami 56
III.
For Marlene, Who Asked Why I Switched Teams 58
Contemplation of a Name 60
I Did Not Take My Camera to Paris 62
Why Can't You Just Listen? 64
The Really Good Dutch Oven 66
Memento Mori 67
I Don't Eat Plums Anymore 68
Uncoupled 69
Taking the Sunrise Tunnel 71
The Gift 72
When You Ask about Karen 73
What You Called to Say at Lunch 75
Ink 76
Pulse: A Memorial in Driftwood, Cannon Beach, OR 78
Solving the Crossword 79
Notes 81
Acknowledgments 82
What People are Saying About This
“In this arresting collection, Caridad Moro-Gronlier renders a vivid and astounding portrait of her womanhood with all its complex intersections and contradictions: her loving resistance against cultural expectations as a daughter of Cuban exiles; her fraught triumph over misogyny; her traumatic healing from sexual assault, her joyful fears of motherhood; and her terrifying courage of coming out and embracing her sexuality. Moro-Gronlier’s unflinching yet vulnerable voice joins the chorus of luminaries the likes of June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa, together singing rebellion in harmony with love.” —Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country
“An unflinching, delicious, and fierce anthem to Cuban-American and queer identities, Tortillera reclaims the homophobic slur of its title, engaging and subverting the canonical tradition of the love poem. Language, in its topographies and powers and failures, lies at the heart of these poems’ investigations: Moro writes, “of loss / the third language / we speak at home.” Tortillera confronts ‘poverty’s rumble,’ familial connections, sometimes fraught, sometimes endearingly tender. ‘Sifting through the rubble’ of fragmented romantic and parental relationships, the book is brilliant in its critique of beauty standards and machismo. I love Caridad Moro’s work, which reverberates with flavors of Miami—guarapo, harina con huevo frito, yuca, lechón—these are poems I admire and applaud, poems I read and reread with a ferocious appetite." —Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal
“‘I wasn’t la niña bonita / my parents wanted,’ says the speaker early on. ‘I was the mouthy one’—and what a ride-of-a-book this is, our narrator ‘croon[ing] words on command’ to flesh out a sometimes heart-wrenching journey . . . from ‘[lying] within a canyon of want’ to being ‘talked into a pool hall / strung out on tequila and cafecito.’ Let’s call it deliciously transgressive—where someone ‘poured red velvet into my glass’ for the sake of this ‘infection we call love’ that may lead one to utter: ‘the ache that is your name’ and experience the ‘warble // of loss.’ In short, Tortillera ‘is a thing of beauty / but not in the way / of Barbie dolls’!” —Francisco Aragón, author of After Rubén
“The poems in Caridad Moro-Gronlier's moving and multi-valent debut Tortillera travel great distances, within the self and beyond. By turns lyric and narrative, tender chronicle meets tough reckoning, the speaker of this unflinching memoir-in-verse plumbs ‘the canyon of want’ as daughter, wife, mother, and ultimately, as the authentic queer woman she was meant to become—'buried for eons, glorious, finally found.’” —Julie Marie Wade, author of When I Was Straight and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing