Q&A with a DACA Poet: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo Discusses Immigration, Reading His Poetry in His Conservative Hometown, and His Next Book

In the past few weeks, as a group of thousands of Central American migrants walks on foot to the US border and President Trump sends thousands of troops to the border to make a “wall of people” to prevent the migrants (dubbed the “caravan”) from seeking asylum, the six final lines of the poem “Cenzontle” (Spanish for “birdsong”) by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo have resurfaced in my mind repeatedly:

Call it wound —
call it beginning —

The bird’s beak twisted
into a small circle of awe.

You called it cutting apart,
I called it song.

Earlier this year, I wrote a profile of Marcelo, a poet and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipient whose poetry navigates his trauma and anxiety related to growing up undocumented in the United States. In that essay, published online at The Paris Review, I attempted to convey the experience of Marcelo’s poetry, albeit in prose. Marcelo’s lyric and image-rich poems, which have few direct references to his material situation (living undocumented, knowing that at any moment he could be separated from his family, the anxiety and hypervigilance that stemmed from this), carry readers across…