Against Erasure: Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead

Abstract

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American immigrants journeying north and a subtle yet bold revision of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, with some words from the Friar’s 1552 text replaced by other words that reflect the realities of twenty-first century immigrants traveling north. Interspersed with de la Casas’s texts are persona poems in which we are invited to listen to the ghosts of immigrants who have suffered tragic deaths. This essay explores the ways that, crossing borders between time and space while drawing strength from his Christian faith, Rodrigo resists the erasure of Indigenous peoples, honors their journeys, and invites readers into solidarity.

1. Introduction

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead (Rodrigo 2023, p. 85). Originally published in Spanish in 2018 and translated into English by Dan Bellm for Flowersong Press in 2023, this book-length poem by Chiapas-based Rodrigo speaks to one of the most pressing injustices of our time: the abuse and violence faced by people on the move, particularly those traveling north from Central America with the hope of crossing the US–Mexico border. Long before dealing with ICE agents, immigrant detention centers, and deportations, migrants encounter many other forms of violence along the way, particularly in Mexico, from narcotraffickers, human traffickers, corrupt police officers, and trusted benefactors turned treacherous. Thousands have disappeared and died en route. While immigration remains a multi-faceted and complex political issue, Rodrigo’s poem—which I read as belonging to the genre that Carolyn Forché has called “poetry of witness”—brings readers into direct contact with the human face of this reality—a face that can be seen from a different perspective once we challenge the deeply entrenched colonial structures that migrants navigate every day.

In her highly influential Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) makes the provocative argument that migration has an extremely long history in the Americas. Contrary to widely held beliefs that Indigenous peoples in different regions of North and Central America had little contact with one another prior to European colonization, Dunbar-Ortiz documents how Indigenous societies from the Aztec Empire to the Sonora Desert to the Great Plains enjoyed much economic and cultural exchange, spreading corn production and trading in turquoise, ceramics, and many other goods (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014, p. 21). The movement of people between what are now the United States of America, Canada, Mexico, and Central America has a long history, one that long predates these nations’ foundation by European settler colonists. If such movement is indeed ancestral and long-standing—and these trade routes are just one example showing that it is—it follows that migration is a natural right for the people whose presence in the US predates the laws of the settler colonial state. Those who enforce these laws, which were originally set down in a series of papal bulls known as the Doctrine of Discovery,1 are the ones committing an injustice.

By Dunbar-Ortiz’s logic, the violence inherent in the current immigration system—even that violence perpetrated long before immigrants arrive at the US border—is a product of “settler colonialism, [which] as an institution or system, requires violence to accomplish its goals” (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014, p. 8). The layers of unjust systems that contribute to the hardships migrants face today—from the US-enforced War on Drugs to exploitative economic policies—are part and parcel of a system based on colonial exploitation. Meanwhile, the well-intentioned idea that we in the US are a “nation of immigrants” unconsciously reinforces the colonial mindset by erasing the reality that Indigenous people still retain an original claim to this land (5). Since the founding of our North American settler colonial states, Indigenous people have resisted not only the seizure of their lands but the erasure of their languages, religions, values, and indeed their identity. Describing a phenomenon she calls “firsting and lasting,” Dunbar-Ortiz discusses our tendency to designate European settlements as the first in a given area (ignoring the reality that these places were originally inhabited by native peoples) and concurrently to erase Indigenous peoples through narratives that speak of the “‘last’ Indians or last tribes, such as ‘the last of the Mohicans’” (9). As Dunbar-Ortiz sees it, every narrative we have about the United States of America—including the oft-lauded idea that we are a diverse nation of immigrants—has relied on this erasure of Indigenous peoples.

The message that Dunbar-Ortiz sets out in her historical analysis parallels the message that Balam Rodrigo communicates through his poetry, which displays a fierce determination to resist the erasure of human beings that the colonial project holds at its core. In The Central American Book of the Dead, place names chosen by the colonizer are replaced by GPS coordinates (with their common names given in parentheses so that they might be identified). Beginning with neutral GPS coordinates compels us to consider the artificiality of naming a place—which, in the Americas since the arrival of Columbus, has also involved claiming a place.2 But the stories of the people who, in the process of migrating, meet violence and death are told in their own voices. Furthermore, while not all the people whose memory Rodrigo seeks to honor are Indigenous, Rodrigo affirms the inherent human dignity of all migrants—as well as the ancestral tendency that Dunbar-Ortiz discusses—by invoking one of the most famous (if imperfect) settler colonist advocates for Indigenous peoples: Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who lived from 14843 through 1566, traveled to the New World, became the first bishop of Chiapas, and was later known as “Protector of the Indians” due to his advocacy for their rights and dignity. By employing the palimpsest technique to alter 10–15% of de las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), Rodrigo shows the chilling relevance of this sixteenth-century document to our twenty-first-century Central and North American reality. Meanwhile, by choosing to erase some of the original author’s words, he makes space for specific immigrant stories that are rarely heard.

Moreover, by drawing on a leading figure of the sixteenth century Roman Catholic Church—and employing Christian imagery and language throughout the text—Rodrigo reveals that while papal bulls may have sought to obliterate the very existence of Indigenous people, the Christian faith that colonization brought to the Americas has paradoxically offered today’s immigrants strength, hope, and a means toward liberation. Not unlike de las Casas, Rodrigo, who has studied pastoral theology and identifies as an evangelical Christian, views faith as a springboard for action. Much like Gustavo Gutiérrez, whose articulation of liberation theology inspired a generation of Latin American Christians, and Simone Weil, who engaged with Christianity amid the horrors of World War II and affirmed love while refusing to deny the omnipresence of evil, Balam Rodrigo presents a faith deeply rooted in the lived experience of human beings, including those faced with insurmountable suffering. While de las Casas’s account was addressed to the prince of Spain, Rodrigo’s revision is addressed directly to us, the readers, whom he calls upon to affirm the dignity of all migrants and work for justice. This book-length poem is a powerful witness to one of the worst indignities of our time and a call to us all to assume the responsibility of redressing it.

2. Palimpsest and Witness

In 1542, Bartolomé de las Casas wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he documented the abuse and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples he was witnessing and pleaded with Philip II of Spain to change his policies. Drawing on this text as a source, Balam Rodrigo structures his own book by dividing it into five sections focused on immigrants traveling north from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Each section is headed by excerpts from the Friar’s account. In some parts, several words are erased and replaced; in others, such as the preface to the section on Nicaragua, over 90% of the original text is unchanged from de las Casas’s original. The major changes that Rodrigo makes involve replacing references to native or Indigenous peoples with references to migrants; he also explicitly acknowledges that his is a literary account, not a historical or journalistic one. Rodrigo’s strategy is clear from the book’s opening, where he quotes an excerpt from de las Casas’s account, replacing some of the original language with words that he has set in italics:

In order to recount the slaughter and ruin of innocent people that has taken place in Mexico against Central American immigrants to the United States […]4 and to disclose such deeds and acts of equal horror to persons who have not known of them […] I have been begged and entreated to put them briefly into writing. This is to my great sorrow, and in outrage and fury, I testify that […] many men hardened of heart have let rapacity and covetousness cast them out of human state, and, led by their wickedness to degeneracy of mind, and not content with their acts of treason and evil, depopulating with extreme cruelty the Central American nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and even further countries […] continue to commit these acts and others yet worse, if such be possible; wherefore I have resolved to present this summary in poetry to you, esteemed Reader, and that is the purpose of the following literary account.

(Rodrigo 2023, p. 17)

It is truly noteworthy through this text how little of the Friar’s original language has been altered. Through his engagement with de las Casas’s text, Rodrigo seeks to show the continuity of these injustices and abuses in the 500 years since the European colonial project in the Americas began. He clearly situates the current abuses faced by immigrants within the framework of European conquest and resettlement. As Dunbar-Ortiz has argued, this violence is bigger than the policies of one US president or government agency; it lies deep within the colonial project itself. In Poetics of Relation, Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant (1990) introduces the concept of “root identity,” in which a society or culture aims to view itself as stable and unchanging, drawing on a foundation myth that, in order to maintain its own legitimacy, it must project onto other people. For Glissant, this “root identity” is “sanctified by the hidden violence of a filiation that strictly follows from this founding episode” and “preserved by being projected onto other territories, making their conquest legitimate—and through the project of a discursive knowledge” (Glissant 1990, p. 144). Indeed, the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire and the twenty-first-century US empire depend very heavily on this “root identity” for their sense of communion and political legitimacy. As such, it should come as no surprise that de las Casas’s words ring so disturbingly true today.

The book begins and ends with these palimpsests of de las Casas, which also head each of the five main sections on Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico. According to scholar Oscar Javier González Molina (2024), the palimpsest technique constitutes “un proceso de desapropiación de autorías ajenas como una propuesta de escritura colectiva que permite descubrir de nueva cuenta, pero con diferentes mecanismos de poder y dominación, las terribles violencias que castigan a los migrantes centroamericanos” (a process of disappropriating other people’s authorial voices as a proposal to write a collective narrative that allows us to discover anew the terrible violence and punishment faced by Central American migrants, but with different mechanisms of power and domination) (170).5 Reading Rodrigo’s revisions of de las Casas’s account, it is clear that the poet’s goal is not to undermine or even critique the Friar’s narrative, but to update it for the present day. That said, it must be noted that de las Casas is a somewhat controversial figure; while in his own time he was dubbed “Protector of the Indians” and is currently under consideration for sainthood in the Catholic Church, he was also an early originator—in the name of protecting Indigenous peoples from European disease—of the proposal to bring enslaved Africans to work in the colonies (a position he soon regretted and recanted) (Sánchez-Godoy 2009, p. iv). Looking at Rodrigo’s text, however, we see a portrayal of de las Casas as a true advocate for the dignity of all. Rodrigo employs erasure not to criticize de las Casas, but to reveal the ongoing relevance of his message. But as González Molina has observed, this palimpsest technique is what makes space for other voices to speak, resulting in a polyphonous text where “el cuerpo violentado del migrante declara sus múltiples muertes como destinatario de una violencia sistemática que, desde la época de la guerra civil, le arrebató su ‘familia’, su ‘corazón’, su ‘palabra’ y su sustento” (the violated body of the migrant declares its multiple deaths as the recipient of a systemic violence that, from the time of the civil war,6 wrenched away their “family,” their “heart,” their “word,” and their support) (176).

Each section, after opening with amended fragments of de las Casas’s texts, turns to a set of persona poems, each one telling the story of a specific migrant who met death on the journey. In some cases, the deceased are clearly Indigenous peoples, particularly in the accounts from Guatemala, where the Popul Vuh7 is referenced many times, as is Mayan culture’s sacred association with corn. Indeed, one of the first poems in the book recounts the journey—sadly interrupted—by a survivor of the genocide the Guatemalan state perpetrated against Indigenous peoples in the 1980s: “I left behind my village’s smell of burnt bodies,/the howling military stench of scorched earth,/napalm and shrapnel gnawing at our bones and our feet,/the hurricane of rape and knives,/the slaughter of Corn People with government-trained dogs” (Rodrigo 2023, p. 25). This heartbreaking account painfully evokes the Guatemalan government’s attempt to eradicate the Ixil, Quiché, and other Mayan groups in Guatemala; however, as Dunbar-Ortiz would surely remind us, the term “Corn People” evokes Indigenous peoples from throughout the Americas, as corn is a commonly shared staple and indeed a sacred crop.

Over and over throughout the text, Rodrigo offers accounts of men and women who are fleeing violence only to meet more violence. At the same time, he intentionally offers a polyphony of voices with a diversity of stories. Many of the migrants—particularly children and young adults—carry hopes and aspirations. “I am 11 years old, now and forever” begins the first poem of the section on El Salvador (Rodrigo 2023, p. 47). After telling us that his father got killed by gang members, leaving him undernourished and desperate, he says he decided to run northward with a 15-year-old friend:

He wanted to be a futbolista like me and play/for the Selecta, we’d go to the majors/and try our luck—that’s why we were aiming/to get to the United States,/where they have more dollars than gangs./At a Mexican sandwich stand/in Coatepeque, Guatemala, I saw an awesome show on TV about El Mágico González:/playing for the best Cádiz club in history/he scored two goals off Barcelona/the year my father was born, 1984; I was so happy I cried./Two days to reach the Mexican border; we crossed the river and hopped onto the Beast,/just past Tecún Uman, in Ciudad Hidalgo. Before we reached Arriaga I fell asleep,/and I’m still falling.

(47)

The child’s voice in this poem is heartbreakingly innocent: like so many children throughout the world, he is a fan of football; he associates the sport’s history with his own family history, referencing a legendary game that took place the year his father was born, and then looking forward in the hope that the sport will be a gateway into his future. The devastating purity of this child’s voice is followed by the poignancy of another character—perhaps an adolescent—who dreams of being a “cantante,/a singer of corridos” but now is “far from Central America, left without a voice” (Rodrigo 2023, p. 49). He describes being decapitated by cartel members in Veracruz, left “a headless singer/with no tongue” (49). As in the previous poem, we see the tragedy of a dream cut short violently and absurdly. However, it is important to note that while most of the characters whose voices we hear in Rodrigo’s polyphonous chorus are innocent victims, some are also perpetrators. Following these two poems in the voices of young people, Rodrigo presents the voice of a gang member. “My name got known in El Salvador/once I wrote it in blood on the prison walls of Cojutepeque: 14 years old and 20 dead bodies, all of them with their guts ripped out/by my machete or my gun” (53). This narrative of a violent gang member killed by a rival forms a stark juxtaposition to the previous two poems, which describe innocent victims. Yet, we see that even in his remorseless attitude toward the rapes and murders he openly admits he committed, he retains a core of humanity as he remembers his childhood. “Since/forever I’ve slept like a baby: my Achilles heel. Sometimes I’d/dream/about Cerveza Pilsener and ceviche and a hammock on the/beach in La Libertad, black sand licking at my feet, pupusas with rice/and loroco and fried fish” (55). By including this portrait of a violent character who tells us to call him “hijueputa,” Rodrigo acknowledges the complex humanity of the immigrants traveling north. Not all of them are innocent children with dreams. Some are perpetrators of violence whose own luck ran out.

Through the inclusion of such stories, Rodrigo avoids that trap of idealism and sentimentality, which can become just as much of an affront to human dignity as xenophobic stereotypes are. He compels us to listen to a diverse chorus of human voices, some of them inevitably hard to hear. Furthermore, we should note that the chorus also includes the voices of women—many of whom experience sexual assault on the journey. In a poem with the long, grimly descriptive title, “An Estimated 80% of Central American Women Migrants Are Raped in Mexico En Route to the United States”—a title he probably took from various reports available at the time he was writing8—the female speaker states, “We’re the animals here;/they hunt and pursue us,/sniff out the green musk of our flesh,/sell it for miserable dollars./Drops, spurts, pools of dark blood,/mirror reflections of Central America./My bruised body casts off limb stumps,/arms, legs, slices of meat” (Rodrigo 2023, p. 79). These vivid descriptions of female experience recur alongside those of male experience throughout the book. Rodrigo truly seeks to represent the widest possible range of immigrant experiences, extending his empathy and compassion as far as he can.

This approach of persona poems, however—particularly writing from the perspectives of anonymous people who have died tragically and violently—does raise an ethical question. What right does a writer have to tell another person’s story? In addition, by extension, what right does a translator have to attempt to represent a reality far removed from personal experience? Within the last decade, the #ownvoices movement has urged writers to be wary of appropriating the narratives of others to amplify their own voices and gain status or literary success from telling stories not their own. Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, an immigrant story written by a US-born white Irish-Puerto Rican author with no personal or close family experience of migration, is a good recent example of a case where a wildly popular book was widely criticized as exploiting the stories of others for personal gain. But while Cummins was for a time “canceled” in the media, she now states that she does not regret writing and publishing a novel about immigration. She affirms that when people asked her why she had written that particular book, her response, looking at the horrific situation unfolding at the US–Mexico border, was to respond, “Why isn’t everyone writing this book?” (Knight 2025). Rodrigo himself makes a similar argument. He mentions that he has Mayan ancestry and, being from Chiapas in the southern part of Mexico, identifies in many ways more closely with Central America than with his own country. But the issue is deeper than one’s place of origin; it is also where one chooses to locate oneself. In an interview with David Anuar, Rodrigo states that in this book and others, he has aimed to combine a universal consciousness with a borderland language, bringing together the global and local:

Hay un posicionamiento ético, si primero yo estaba tan metido en el logismo y en reflejar ese estado del lenguaje, después quise reflejar ese estado de inconformidad y manifestar mi queja, mi pesadumbre, mi decepción ante la infamia, ante la injusticia social, pero que primero fuese poesía, literatura. Y bueno, ahí están esos libros de carácter testimonial y documental que creo yo tan necesarios.

(There’s an ethical positioning. Though at first I was so caught up in logicism and in reflecting that state within language, I later tried to reflect that state of disapproval and manifest my complaint, my grief, my disappointment at the disgraces I saw, the social injustices—but before anything else I wanted to create poetry, literature. And so, here are these testimonials, these documentary works that I find so necessary.)

(Anuar 2018)

Bellm’s decision to translate this particular text—and Flowersong Press’s decision to publish it—also reflects an ethical positioning. Only a tiny selection of non-English texts are translated into English; fewer are published. The translation and publication of poetry is rarely remunerated; most poetry translators work full-time jobs and devote time to translation as a true labor of love. Bellm’s decision to choose this particular text clearly reflects a love of the poetry itself, but also a commitment to draw the reader’s attention to some of the harshest realities of our time.

For many readers in Anglophone North America, the author who most comes to mind when we speak of poetry that bears witness to injustice is Carolyn Forché (Forché and Wu 2014). After having the opportunity to travel to El Salvador in 1977 and documenting the brutal human rights abuses she saw in the years before Archbishop Oscar Romero’s 1980 martyrdom, she described the need of the poet to observe the realities taking place and share that knowledge—no matter how grim—with others. “In my sense of this term, [witness] is a mode of reading rather than of writing, of readerly encounter with the literature of that-which-happened, and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational—as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood” (Forché and Wu 2014, p. 21). For her, questions of who has the right to tell which story become less relevant than the content of the stories themselves: the truths that are revealed, the relationships between reader and writer, and the dialogue that occurs. She argues that poetry of witness is neither confessional nor representational, but relational, where “the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation” (26). Scholars Alicia Privado and Antón Abner (Privado and Abner 2021) locate this effect in Rodrigo’s poetry, which “desarrolla una misión sanadora y reconstructora del tejido social mediante los ritos de ‘levantamiento del espíritu’ de las y los migrantes que han quedado en el camino y en su re-dignificación por medio del reconocimiento, la visibilización y la escucha de sus historias” (develops a healing, reconstructive mission for the social fabric, mediated by rituals of “raising the spirits” of male and female migrants lost on the way and re-dignifying them by recognizing, making visible, and listening to their stories) (63). Rodrigo is asking us to serve as witnesses to these stories—and then, to be ready to testify in solidarity, just as Bartolomé de las Casas did in his time. Like de las Casas, Rodrigo—an evangelical Christian who has studied pastoral theology—draws on Jesus’s teachings to express the need for justice. Following that, he affirms the power of prophecy to stir readers to action.

3. Affliction and Liberation

Rodrigo’s book abounds with imagery drawn from the Christian narrative—imagery that is ambiguous and at times baffling. Most often, Rodrigo’s invocations of Christianity come across as bleak and despairing. The first poem in the book, a parody of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in the biblical Book of Matthew, begins thus:

And God too was in exile, migrating without end;/he traveled, riding The Beast, and had not been crucified/but was maimed in the arms and legs, mute, and ashen all over/as he fell in the shape of a cross from the highest heavens, thrown down by delinquents from the black clouds of the train,/from the endless labyrinth of gondolas and boxcars,/and I saw plainly how his ribs had been pierced/by the curved spears of smugglers, the gun butts of cops,/the bayonets of soldiers, the narcos’ extorting/tongues, and his suffering was as great/as that of all the migrants put together.

(Rodrigo 2023, p. 19)

This is not an image of a God that is all-knowing or all-powerful. It is the Christian God at its best, Christ crucified—indeed, more than merely nailed to a cross, God becomes the cross—taking on all the sorrow, suffering, and violence of humanity. To the problem of evil—the perpetually unresolved question of why suffering exists in the world—Rodrigo’s answer is the same as that of so many other theologians throughout time: we do not know and cannot know. What we do know, however, is that God suffers with us and accompanies us in our suffering.

That said, if we as readers did not know that Rodrigo is a professed Christian, it would be easy to read this text as a scathing, mocking indictment of the religion. The poems offer little in terms of comfort or consolation. Again and again, we are told that the souls of the dead are not in heaven, but trapped right in the places where the deaths occurred. Indeed, this image is not inconsistent with some Christians’ belief that we do not proceed to an afterlife upon death, but instead must wait until the Final Judgment, when our bodies as well as our souls will be given new life. However, most Christians do believe that there are two levels of judgment: a personal judgment, where souls are sent to an afterlife immediately upon death, followed by a final judgment at the end of time, when Christ will return to earth and judge the living and the dead (Mühling 2023). With this Christian theology in mind, it would be easy to read these poems as denying any possibility of redemption or resurrection. “I want to tell you I’m not in paradise,/I’m down a lost well on the banks of the Río Bravo” states a Honduran migrant who was trapped by narcotraffickers and forced to work as a drug mule (Rodrigo 2023, p. 63). “There’s a country of salt beneath my face,” states another migrant, who was attacked by a machete. “How, cut to pieces as I am,/will I be resurrected?” he asks. The characters of these poems are ghosts, permanently stuck in a liminal space between this world and another, unable to achieve any freedom. Furthermore, while belief in ghosts has coexisted syncretically with Christianity in many cultural contexts since its inception, it is not standard Christian theology. Meanwhile, a caravan of Central American mothers searching for their disappeared children recall a pastor speaking of the Garden of Eden, that beautiful land of abundance between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates where Adam and Eve lived, and then, between the Río Bravo and Río Suchiate, “this enormous garden of death for the departed children of Central America,/the fertile burying ground called Mexico: Far from God and so very close to smugglers,/cops, border agents, narcos, coyotes, pimps,/molesters, traffickers, thieves” (111). This bleak parody of the Garden of Eden is inordinately stark and cruel, seeming to mock a religious believer’s faith.

If we did not know that Rodrigo is a person of faith, all of these examples could easily be read as bitterly ironic critiques of religious belief. Where is God amid all this suffering? How could any divine force allow such heinous acts to occur? This scathing approach is only intensified when we look at a verb that occurs throughout the text: levantar, which means “to rise” in various contexts. Depending on the phrasing, it could mean to lift or raise an object, to move from a sitting position to a standing one, or, in a religious context, to be raised from the dead. Dan Bellm has made the decision to translate it using different English words throughout the poem, varying his choices with the context. However, Rodrigo makes a note—which Bellm has translated—that draws the reader’s attention to the ambiguous multiple meanings of this word in the context of migration:

The Spanish verb levantar (to raise or pick up, or in other contexts, to awaken) has become a euphemism in news parlance, perhaps borrowed from the slang term that criminals and the police use to disguise their arbitrary or illegal capture or abduction of persons, which is often followed by torture, killing or disappearance. The word can also refer to arbitrary detentions committed by public servants or other functionaries.

(Rodrigo 2023, p. 65)

The recurrence of this word throughout the text adds to what could be read as a scathing interpretation of Christianity. In “Migrant’s Prayer,” the word is used in nearly every line; Rodrigo deftly plays with its various meanings, which Bellm has chosen to capture using different English words that all translate to the same verb: “I don’t want to get up, father./I don’t want you to wake me up, mother./I’d rather fall, I’d rather fall,/into the loving, knife-sharp arms of the Beast […] I used to get myself up for school, father./I used to get myself up to go play, mother./The caress of your hands would raise me up from sleep” (65). The poem continues with the child saying again and again that he hopes not to be “levantado”—snatched up, carried off, kidnapped. Any death is better than a violent one. But throughout this entire book, violent deaths occur again and again. After this poem—which comes right at the center, in the section of Honduras—the word “levantar” appears in other poems, and we are always reminded of this first one. When a Nicaraguan migrant who died in an unspecified violent way states, “Now I’ve got no grave, no rest./I only wait resurrection day to raise me up,” our attention is drawn to the cruel irony of the phrase “raise me up,” translated from levantar, which very likely refers to the horrific way this person has died. Levantar punctuates the text, lifting people up, only to throw them down.

Andyet, Rodrigo is a professed Christian. How can the faith he professes be reconciled with the horrors that he recounts? Many theologians would offer answers, but for me, few are as persuasive as those of French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil (1909–1943), who has left us with some of the twentieth century’s most provocative writings on human suffering and the need for justice. Raised in a secular Jewish family, Weil had mystical experiences at a young age and felt drawn toward Christianity, but ultimately chose not to enter the Church, seeking to communicate her ideas to a secular audience as well as to a religious one. For Weil, affliction and pain lie at the heart of human reality, and before we can try to work for justice—which she views as essential—we have to accept reality as it is. In her famed essay collection, Gravity and Grace, she states,

We have to say like Ivan Karamazov that nothing can make up for a single tear from a single child, and yet to accept all tears and the nameless horrors which are beyond tears. We have to accept these things, not in so far as they bring compensation with them, but in themselves. We have to accept the fact that they exist simply because they do exist.

(Weil 1999, p. 81)

As Weil sees it, human life inevitably leads us to the Cross, crying, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27, p. 46).

The realities of pain, suffering, and violence do not negate the existence of a loving God in Simone Weil’s view. Never giving in to nihilism or despair, Weil’s faith grew out of her solidarity with factory workers, Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and ultimately with all of Hitler’s victims. Indeed, her witness to the horrors of World War II led her to return to Europe from the United States (where she had fled with her parents), to work for the Allied war effort from London and ultimately to die prematurely when, facing ill health and disobeying her doctor’s orders, she refused to eat more than her ration. Through these experiences and many others, Weil was able to accept the reality of evil without ever losing her belief in human goodness and love. “Of the links between God and man, love is the greatest. It is as great as the distance to be crossed,” she states in her essay on the Cross (Weil 1999, p. 90). She then states that the great distance between God and humanity reveals the immensity of divine love. “So that the love may be as great as possible, the distance is as great as possible. That is why evil can extend to the extreme limit beyond which the very possibility of good disappears. Evil is permitted to touch this limit. It sometimes seems as though it overpassed it” (90). To the question of why evil exists, Weil’s answer is much like that of God in the book of Job: it exists because it does. There is no answer, no explanation. If we believe in the extreme, seemingly impossible love that Christianity professes—demonstrated through a man wrongly accused of a crime who then sacrifices his life for the good of all—then we must also accept the extremity of that human suffering. There is indeed a great distance between divine and human reality. There are some moments when God abandons, when goodness fails.

The moments of desperation, of bleakness, of the cruel irony of migrants waiting to be levantado demonstrate this affliction that Weil—writing in the context of war and genocide—found to be so immediately present. For Rodrigo, as for Weil, there are no easy answers. Many Christians believe that suffering can be redemptive—Weil herself states, “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it” (Weil 1999, p. 81). In Rodrigo’s bleak Underworld of people who have met violent deaths, the supernatural seems notably absent, and there is no use for suffering—except, perhaps, for the possibility it offers of stirring compassion in the people who witness it. But Rodrigo maintains a faith that, even amid the worst cruelty, the potential for goodness is present. Toward the very end of the text, Rodrigo offers a hopeful prophecy. After stating that “the harvest of bodies is ripe,/and the enemies of love,/thresh hearts with a scythe,” he goes on to offer a promise that reads like a twenty-first-century retelling of the words of the prophet Isaiah:

And in a blink of wing beats/the resurrection of the disappeared/will come to pass, and legions of migrants/will rise up over vengeance and fury./The hard wings of insects will again slice the air,/and the deafening rumble of The Beast/will be a low echo,/no longer crawling in the direction of blood/Day after crucified day/on the trestles that hold up the rails/where the world’s pain travels,/all of the migrants scattered bones/will gather around his bodiless body/and blossom until they stand tall/and beautiful and blue in their everyday flesh.

(Rodrigo 2023, p. 121)

The poem concludes with an invocation of the Last Judgment, the moment when the dead will be raised—and here, Rodrigo uses the word resurrección, rather than the dubious levantar, to make his meaning clear. He awaits the Final Judgment when wrongs will be righted with the pained hope of Simone Weil, a hope that persists when the distance between God and humanity seems at its most distant. Unfortunately, Rodrigo’s prophetic vision—this dream of a just future—is quickly tempered by the reality of the present moment. The collection’s final poem, entitled “The Migrant,” has just one line: “And when he woke up, la migra was still there” (Rodrigo 2023, p. 123). Once again, a reader unaware of Rodrigo’s beliefs might read this final poem as another cruel, ironic twist of the narrative—a hopeful dream followed by a harsh reality, more evidence that evil wins the day. As Simone Weil shows us, sometimes—often—it does. But this victory of pain and sorrow does not preclude the possibility of goodness. Turning back to the palimpsest of de las Casas’s admonition of the Spanish Crown—which Rodrigo transforms to address both God and his readers—he ultimately looks for goodness within his Mexican audience—and, now through Dan Bellm’s passionate translation, his English-speaking North American audience—urging us to witness the sufferings of Central American migrants and act to ameliorate them.

Before discussing the poem’s conclusion, however, it is necessary to make a further comment on Rodrigo’s Christianity. This essay began with a discussion of the European colonization of Indigenous peoples—a reality that, as thinkers such as Dunbar-Ortiz and Glissant remind us, is completely fraught with violence. Indeed, as was mentioned at the start of this essay, the very process of conquest and colonization was sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church through a series of papal bulls known collectively as the Doctrine of Discovery. Therein lies a paradox: while Rodrigo harshly critiques the violent colonial legacy inherited by today’s Central American immigrants, he ultimately draws on Christianity as a source of liberation and hope. But this paradox lies at the heart of Christianity’s global presence (that a Jewish sect once persecuted by an empire became part of that empire’s conquering arm and spread throughout the world) and also at the center of the American reality: from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, our settler colonial nation states, governments, religions, languages, and cultures are a product of the conquest begun in 1492.

For many Latin American thinkers and writers, this paradox is not something to deny or be ashamed of; it is simply a reality we must acknowledge. However unjustly Christianity may have been brought to the Americas, it has since offered hope and inspiration to millions. In his renowned 1971 A Theology of Liberation, Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez—who, like Bartolomé de las Casas, was of the Dominican order—seeks to shift theological studies from theory to practice, focusing on the lived experiences of Christians, and from Europe to the post-colonial world. “Behind liberation theology are Christian communities, religious groups and peoples, who are becoming increasingly conscious that the oppression and neglect from which they suffer are incompatible with their faith in Jesus Christ […] In liberation theology, faith and life are inseparable,” he states (Gutiérrez 1988, p. xix). Like Gutiérrez, Rodrigo takes as his starting point not theoretical ideals, but the lived realities of marginalized people. Meanwhile, on the relationship between indigeneity and Christianity, many thinkers—such as Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa (2012)—have found liberatory potential in the paradox. She gives the example of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Catholic figure of immense importance to many people, from narcotraffickers to right-wing US Catholics who support the illegality of abortion. Guadalupe is the synthesis of the Aztec mother goddess Tonantsí and Mary, Mother of Jesus. As Anzaldúa sees it, this image of the Virgin Mary—who, according to legend, appeared to the Aztec boy Saint Juan Diego in 1531, ordering a church be constructed in her honor—reveals the liberatory power of Christianity through Mary’s embodied solidarity with the Indigenous:

Because Guadalupe took upon herself the psychological and physical devastation of the conquered and oppressed indio, she is our spiritual, political and psychological symbol. As a symbol of hope and faith, she sustains and insures our survival. The Indian, despite extreme despair, suffering and near genocide, has survived. To Mexicans on both sides of the [US–Mexico] border, Guadalupe is the symbol of our rebellion against the rich, upper and middleclass, against their subjugation of the poor and the indio […] She mediates between humans and the divine, between this reality and the reality of spirit entities. La Virgen de Guadalupe is the symbol of ethnic identity and of the tolerance for ambiguity that Chicano-mexicanos, people of mixed race, people who have Indian blood, people who cross cultures, by necessity possess.

(52)

The Virgin of Guadalupe is considered the patron saint of the Americas. Her character is that of the Americas themselves—a combination of cultures. This synthesis is emblematic of Christianity as a whole, which—by no means the only or even the dominant religion of the Americas, has left a permanent mark on the hemisphere.

In his world-renowned treatise on colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth, Martinican psychiatrist and theorist Frantz Fanon (1963) comments on the ways in which colonialism destroys a colonized nation when the imperial powers devalue a people’s culture, history, and language, essentially leaving them with nothing to call their own, forcing them to rediscover their lost identity through the language and culture of the invading power. However, Fanon notes that, while much is irrevocably lost, there is also the opportunity for originality and creativity as something new is created, potentially bringing in a “new movement [that] gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination” (241). He cites the development of jazz music in the US South by enslaved Africans as a prime example of this creative synthesis. Anzaldúa offers the Virgin of Guadalupe as another example. Meanwhile, Gutiérrez presents a Christianity that is grounded in the lived experience of Latin American people rather than the abstract theories of Eurocentric theologians. For Balsam Rodrigo, the lived experience of migrants—whether of Indigenous or mixed backgrounds—is never far from the experience of Christ. Furthermore, much like Bartolomé de las Casas, Rodrigo believes that anyone who would identify as Christian—and indeed, in the secular milieu of the twenty-first century, anyone who would not—must follow Christ’s greatest commandment: to love our neighbors as ourselves, with “neighbor” defined as all humanity.

4. Conclusions

Rodrigo ends this book close to where he began it: with words of Bartolomé de las Casas, addressed to us, the readers, rather than the Spanish Crown. After showing the horrors that migrants have endured, he supplicates us to act. Again, the italicized words are his amendments; everything else is original to de las Casas’s text:

I therefore beg of you, Reader, to receive this work with the grace and kindness you bestow on all your servants who desire, as does your faithful subject here undersigned, no more than to serve the cause of public good and well-being, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And I beg of you, Reader, that once you have seen and understood the deformity of injustice wrought upon these innocent migrants of Central America, slaughtered and dismembered for no just cause or reason but for nefarious ambition and covetousness, to find the good will to supplicate and persuade others, and even our God, to deny with perpetual silence, and with fear and terror, anyone who proposes to undertake such baneful and detestable enterprises, so that no one henceforth will dare even to mention them.

(Rodrigo 2023, p. 127)

At a time when we read dehumanizing reports daily of the treatment of migrants—a time when people in the United States rejoice to see their own neighbors sent without due process to a notoriously brutal foreign prison—Balsam Rodrigo’s astonishing palimpsest calls us not merely to outrage or lamentation, but to action. We live within a governmental system predicated on the erasure of Indigenous peoples and the prohibition of their descendants’ movement across borders—borders that have themselves been created and enforced by violence. Knowledge of this reality is a first step.

In terms of how to turn knowledge into action, we must discern the next steps forward based on our abilities and position. Then, we must act. Balam Rodrigo, an award-winning writer, has acted by choosing to write about migration, one of the most salient issues of our day. Translator Dan Bellm has acted by choosing to translate into English, thereby making it accessible to many more readers. Flowersong Press has acted by publishing it.9 Bellm has also taken action through direct aid to immigrants as a volunteer legal interpreter. In March 2023, Pope Francis took an action by repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery—a long overdue step toward rectifying the 500-year-old attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples. Around the US, communities of Catholic sisters, which in recent years have dwindled in numbers as older ones die out and significantly fewer young women choose to enter vowed religious life, are taking action by seeking to return property to the Indigenous peoples who originally inhabited it, setting an example for us all. No matter who we are, there is undoubtedly something we can do to witness the injustices committed against migrants and work toward justice. Refusing to accept the erasure of those who have died following ancestral migration routes northward, Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead ends with a direct appeal to us, his readers. The prophetic vision he sees of justice and human dignity begins in this world, here and now, with us.