Poetry is all about making connections, and Claudia Castro Luna sees deep connections between people and places. As Seattle’s first official Civic Poet, she was the creator of the Seattle Poetic Grid, an online map that links familiar sites in the city to poems people have written about them. Now she’s Washington’s poet laureate, and headed for a visit and reading in Vancouver tonight at the downtown community library.
Castro Luna also unflinchingly draws painful links between people, places, politics and history. In a recent open letter to children now seeking asylum in the United States, she recalled a century of U.S. invasions, interventions and manipulations in Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The current flight of desperate people from war, poverty and civil chaos south or our border is nothing but a predictable outcome of reckless American imperialism, she wrote in the piece, published in December in YES! Magazine of Bainbridge Island.
“The U.S. has disrupted economic and political life in Central America but now refuses to see in your tired faces the outcome of its opportunistic history in the region,” she wrote.
She’s drawing on personal experience. Castro Luna grew up in El Salvador and was 13 years old in 1981, when two men knocked at the family door and asked after her mother. The 13-year-old proudly informed them that her mother was teaching at the local elementary school, she recalled in an interview with Humanities Washington.
She didn’t realize she was talking to a death squad. This was at the height of El Salvador’s brutal 12-year civil war; teachers and readers were mistrusted by the right-wing government, and the school’s principal had already been assassinated. The family fled their home immediately upon learning of young Claudia’s accidental reveal, but their new neighborhood was awash in gunfire and grenades. The family eventually immigrated to the United States, safely and sanely — not on foot in a mob — because Castro Luna’s mother had applied, years earlier.
“It just seemed like we were doomed if we stayed. We were in danger of being killed. It wasn’t one thing. It was just death all around, and fear. A lot of fear,” she told Humanities Washington.
The family came through Florida and New Jersey before landing in California. Castro Luna began high school without speaking a word of English. She studied urban planning at UCLA, then turned to poetry and teaching when already a working mother.
“I had no choice. It chose me. I really feel that way,” she told Humanities Washington.
Castro Luna is the author of “This City,” poetry about Seattle, and ” Killing Mar?as,” poetry about the disappeared women of Juarez, Mexico, where the female murder rate is notorious and world-famous; she’s currently working on a memoir called “Like Water to Drink” about her escape from the Salvadoran Civil War.
Castro Luna’s term as Washington poet laureate lasts from February 2018 through January 2020. Her travels around the state as an ambassador for poetry bring her to Vancouver today, for a reading at 6:30 p.m. at the downtown community library (as part of the regular Ghost Town Poetry open mic that’s usually held at Niche Wine Bar — so you’ll be treated to some less-famous local poets too).
Before that, from 5 to 6 p.m., she’ll be signing books at Niche Wine Bar, 1013 Main St.; after the reading at the library she’ll be back at Niche for an after-party.
