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QUEER MIGRANT POET SONIA GUIÑANSACA TALKS FRANKLY ABOUT BREAKING DOWN BORDERS AND BEING A BADASS
If you follow Sonia Guiñansaca on Instagram, you'll know that her feed is one of vibrant colours, empowering art, wise-beyond-her-years words and an energy that demands attention. And if you don't, you probably should. Here, the 28-year-old author of Nostalgia And Borders tells her story so far.
NOSTALGIA
"My first memories of writing are of when I was really small in a little pocket journal - the type your parents can get into because the little padlock doesn't work. Being a young, brown migrant child, writing was my mechanism of honing in on who I was becoming, making sense of the world around me, of my immigration status and of growing up in New York.
"When I was a little older, I began exploring policy work and getting more involved in legislation around immigration - which completely burned me out. It took a toll on my soul and so I went back to writing poetry, focusing instead on humanising the migrant experience, touching on mixed-status families, undocumented people, and through that, realising my own nostalgia for home. I also used it as a way to make sense of my queerness, of my being brown and being femme. My poetry exists at the intersection of each of these."
BORDERS
"As a young child I migrated from Cuenca in Ecuador to New York City to reunite with my family who had migrated - earlier for economic reasons. The five years that I spent without my ? parents were the toughest. This was before Skype, before FaceTime, so the only connection I had with them was through phone calls. Those five years politicised - and I'm giving \ this language I don't think my : three or four-year-old self would ^ have understood - but it made me aware of this disadvantage that I had as a child. Why did my parents have to migrate? Where were they? Why weren't they here for my birthday?
"After reuniting with my family, I was welcomed into an amazing community of folks from the Dominican Republic, from Puerto Rico. I didn't understand the otherness until turning on the TV to the very conservative Fox News,...