Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is the featured author of this new issue of Latin American Literature Today. Cabezón Cámara has not written many novels, but those she has are all high-quality. Las niñas del naranjel (2023) was met with critical acclaim, and in the United States its translation to English—We Are Green and Trembling by renowned U.S. translator Robin Myers—was chosen as the winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Robin herself appeared on the cover of LALT last year, so this feature serves to confirm that the relationships behind literature are always alive, whether we know it or not.
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is also a recognized activist, feminist, and environmentalist. She is co-founder of the Ni Una Menos movement, an initiative that works to combat femicides—that form of barbarism that neither civilization nor law have quelled. We should be proud that there are movements that decry and oppose violence against women in Latin America—especially when, in other parts of the world, women are persecuted by the repressive agents of a moral police, as in the Iran of the ayatollahs. When we think of the women of Latin America, we think also of the women of Iran. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is a writer through and through—it bears repeating—but she is also an author in whose work literature, feminism, and concern for the environment come together, naturally and organically.
This issue’s second dossier is an homage to one of the most countercultural publications that has ever come out of Latin America: Cerdos & Peces. Starting with its founding in 1983 as a supplement to the magazine El Porteño, Cerdos & Peces was directed by journalist and writer Enrique Symns (1945-2023). Its staff included writer and editor Andrea Álvarez Mujica, who then went by Vera Land. Cerdos & Peces published fifty-nine issues, and now forms part of that scanty list of projects—magazines, books, and rock bands—that can be classified as true legends.
Vera Land has been the memory of Cerdos & Peces, and now we meet again in the digital pages of LALT. Some conversations last a lifetime.
But that’s not all. Enrique Symns was a visionary and an outcast. He came face to face with mystery and with the Plan: he spoke at length about the former, and he denounced the latter along with all its accomplices. It wasn’t normal life that hurt him, but normalized life: he was a little boy leaving his short pants behind to become a sad, humdrum adult. He knew he had to escape through the interstices in reality. He didn’t always succeed. He dwelled in the bars of Buenos Aires back when they were danger zones where hunters stalked, in smoky rooms full of friends where he sought those adventures you can only find at night. Symns was an unrepeatable phenomenon, a full-time tornado, a friend and a traveler from the lost age when the stars lit up life with the colors of an endless party. In this dossier, we pay homage to Cerdos & Peces, but also to counterculture, to true dissidence—not the kind we know now, with its papier-mâché formulas and controlled risks.
Elsewhere, this issue of LALT brings interviews with Spanish philologist, poet, and translator José María Micó, Argentine writer and journalist Mempo Giardinelli—author of the iconic novels Luna caliente (1983) and Santo Oficio de la Memoria (2014)—and Chilean writer Emma Sepúlveda, recently translated by our dear friend Denise Kripper. In the essay section, we share two finalist pieces from LALT’s third annual essay contest (2025). We continue to advocate for this genre: someday, we will all acknowledge the futility of the mass-produced junk we call “papers” and academic articles, and we’ll once again think with our intuition, our curiosity, and our bodies. Sometimes, at night, you can hear wild animals howling under the storm.
Thanks to our literary friendship with the Spanish edition of Letras Libres, we reproduce an essay on Álvaro Pombo, winner of the 2024 Miguel de Cervantes Prize. Thank you, Daniel Gascón, for being here.
This edition of LALT comes with many poems and many stories, as our issues always have; with indigenous literature, reviews of books from many different Latin American countries, previews of new translations, and much more.
I’ll sign off with the memory of Enrique Symns, with his white, messy hair, sitting at the mythical bar Liguria in Santiago’s Providencia district: a prophet who descended from Buenos Aires to deliver us from the rigid script of Chilean life. Always smoking, with a glass of whiskey in his hand and someone sitting beside him. I remember him because Symns knew, in the end, the heroes would be hired by Hollywood and the travelers would become fat, boring tourists. The Plan would defeat us all, but not all of us would go down without a fight. Enrique Symns founded this gang of secret heroes, and with it we flew through the tunnels of imagination and along the sharp edges of reality. We are not alone; we bid a fond farewell now like Enrique did years ago, with a drink in his hand and tears in his eyes: “I raise a glass to all those who insist on remaining ignorant of the mystery of existence. May they close their eyes as they toast, and when they open them again, may the setting be another and the work wonderful. I raise a glass to those intrepid few who are sad today, to the wanderers who think they are lost, to the rebels who are resigned, to the persecuted who meekly keep their secret. May their worst goals be achieved. May they find joy in their worst moment. May they continue being stowaways hidden in the folds of the collective nightmare. May they never be found, may they always make it on time or may time not exist such that they might make it.”
Cheers!
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