“Anybody who thinks they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of the terror, is wrong.”
– Fred Moten
Isthmus Zapotec poet Irma Pineda’s Stolen Flower wields heart-wrenching, beautiful poetry—flowered words—against the grain of state-sponsored terror. She tends to the wounds of Indigenous women who have survived rape and of those who have died, who in turn survive even death through their stories voiced on the page. Stolen Flower (Guie’ ni zinebe / La flor que se llevó; Yale University Press, 2025; originally published in Mexico in 2013) was sparked by a crime committed in 2007, when Mexican soldiers raped seventy-three-year-old Nahua woman Ernestina Ascencio Rosario in Soledad Atzompa, Veracruz. In a gesture of inter-Indigenous solidarity, Pineda’s condemnation of this atrocity reawakened painful memories of assaults on her Zapotec community and family, echoing the violence faced by Indigenous Nations throughout Mexico. She characterizes her work as part of a socially committed literary movement spanning Mexico. Her engagement with the history of Soledad Atzompa—what Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Lisa Betasamosake Simpson would term ceremony—offers what Pineda describes as “poetry about absence, pain, lost traditions, kidnappings, human trafficking, desperate migrations, the military state, and assassinations.” Rather than a poesía resurrecta (resurgent/resurrected poetry), suggesting the revitalization of moribund Native cultural practices, Stolen Flower mobilizes its forty-six untitled poems in a poesía insurrecta (insurgent poetry) that compels readers to feel the violence inflicted upon Native Nations. An essential addition to anyone’s library, this trilingual Didxazá-Spanish-English edition brings a landmark work to a broad audience through Wendy Call’s richly textured English translation.
Pineda describes her Didxazá and Spanish versions as mirrors held up to one another: “You must think of them as parallel poems, one poem created in our language and another poem in Spanish. Both versions uphold their respective literary traditions” (viii). The prism of these parallel versions refracts into Wendy Call’s English translations. She weaves between two textual paths, reading between the stanzas in both Didxazá and Spanish. Call explains: “I have two paths into English. Some lines of my English translations might seem a bit distant from the Spanish because I have chosen the Didxazá path” (viii). For instance, where the Spanish reads “el gran árbol de nuestra memoria” (the great tree of our memory), her English rendering, “the great tree of our wisdom,” deliberately appeals to a Didxazá word that encompasses collective knowledge. Call concludes that, in English, “our wisdom” was “the best among insufficient options” (viii). As Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil and Gladys Tzul Tzul affirm, Indigenous languages are political. In an era when AI stomps out meaning—stripping away the intricate contexts of language—it is more vital than ever to nourish the political and social relationships forged through these exchanges.
Pineda’s work invites a deeper understanding of translation; words extend beyond mere lexicon to embrace contexts and relations. Tracing another difference in these textual paths, Pineda and Call signal that objects such as stones take on animacy in Didxazá and “hold collective memory and cultural history” (98). Like a stone, a poem can breathe life and be a relative. Call’s translations go beyond words on the page to forge such relationships. This trans(re)lation is the product of nearly two decades of collaboration—of co-labor—between Call and Pineda. They have discussed multiple versions, and Call has advanced in her study of Didxazá to the point where she can now read the poems’ reflections in both original languages.
In their narrative arc, the poems ultimately assume a firm posture of defiant survival. A call to action permeates the following untitled poem:
No wound hurts
like the silence
of those watching our flesh lanced open
listening resigned to the crunch of bones and show their concern
by mopping up spilled blood
so it won’t dirty the dawn (36).
Indifferent observation is not an option. These poems breathe fiery words into complicit silences, making it impossible to look away. One could think of the many tourists who travel to Mexico, oblivious—or just silent—in the face of oppression. “The dawn” evokes a façade of touristy panoramas, where Indigenous artists are only expected to display marketable traditions, rather than denounce dispossession.
In response to systemic violence, a communal subjectivity weaves a collective we into the fabric of Stolen Flower. This is, in the words of Cherokee-Appalachian poet Marilou Awiakta, “an art for life’s sake.” Having lived through her father’s abduction in 1978 and the military invasion of Juchitán in 1983, Pineda views the oppression of Nahua communities in Stolen Flower through the lens of her own community’s survival: “I was filled with so much sadness and anger. All those earlier experiences with military presence in our communities were sleeping deep in my memory” (vi).
The poems strike a tone of defiance, or, in Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor’s terms, survivance:
Who are we now?
If the vibrant glow of threads we wore has been masked by mud
to hide us from the poisonous glare you sling
Who does your fiery breath hurt?
You might knock me down
I might fall
but let me tell you
others will rise up and defy you (6).
Where an individual might fall, a collective force rises. A less nuanced translation might render the line as “I will fall,” but that misses the uncertainty of “Yo caeré”—which presents the fall as a risk to be braved, rather than an inevitable fatality. The poems’ scarce punctuation mirrors the tumult described within them:
Don’t hurry your steps mother
I too want to escape down the path
want to find other hearts
and speak without fear
But I can’t leave so quickly
with the shadows of our dead
entangling my feet (46).
Stolen Flower eschews the finality of periods in a knot of enjambment, ellipses, questions, and exclamations—a reflection of the battles that remain unfinished today. And this isn’t just a vision for the future, but a deep engagement with previous generations—one that honors the ancestors buried in the precious land while looking toward the future. It is a plea to remain rooted; the “shadows of our dead” are not just ghosts, but the very value and history of the territory. As the book progresses, the voice of defiance gathers strength:
Words and memory have more power than your weapons
We are the ancient tree that holds all history in its every branch
Your green is a disguise telling lies
Perhaps you think we’re nearsighted?
Even if were blind
we will still hear the distant sound
of your body crawling
belly to earth like some worm
We know you will arrive like a snake
spitting your venom
vomiting fire
even after you incinerate our bodies
the rocks will burn with our memory’s light (80).
In her translator’s notes, Call clarifies that the stones are a bicultural bridge—honoring the Zapotec belief in their living spirit while drawing on a Spanish metaphor that celebrates the permanence of stone over the fragility of paper. Crucially, Stolen Flower avoids idealizing Indigenous Nations. The poetic voice addresses the Indigenous soldiers—those disguised in green uniforms—who perpetrate atrocities: “Where did you bury your dreams? / Give me your hands and calm your heart” (86). Like fellow Southern Mexican writers Mikel Ruiz, Martín Tonalmeyotl, and Hubert Matiúwàa, Pineda moves beyond mere linguistic and cultural revitalization to probe the agonizing complexities of Indigenous communities. Her poems crescendo into affirmations of strength.
A statistic frequently shared by Wendy Call and Irma Pineda reveals a stark contrast: while over 20% of literary publications in Mexico are translations, in the U.S. just 3% are translated works—and for Indigenous languages, those figures plummet in both countries. This paucity stems from a deep-seated resistance to the distinct epistemologies these languages offer. Stolen Flower is a masterful addition to any library, actively pushing these statistics in a more inclusive direction. By placing the translator’s notes at the end, the edition ensures an uninterrupted flow of poetry while still inviting deeper reflection on Pineda’s work and the wider social struggles it represents. Stolen Flower is a transformative read for anyone seeking to relate with the complexities of our shared world.
