I have read every one of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s books. I first discovered him via while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (2019), then went all the way back to Caneca de anhelos turbios (2011), and continued reading until antes que isla es volcán / before island is volcano (2022), my favorite—until now.
I’ve read all these books slowly, with a kind of reverence. I return to them when I feel like I’m losing language or memory—when I need to be reminded that poetry can still hold truth in a world determined to erase it.
So it was a gift—a long dab of healing balm—to read Algarabía (Graywolf) and then get to speak with him about it. We are both Puerto Rican, both shaped by the heartbreak and brilliance of a colonized people. But Roque’s voice—his clarity, his depth of courage, his lyricism—has always struck me as singular.
In this conversation, we talked about monsters and myths, laughter and protest, translation and trance. He spoke about poetry as soul work, about refusing the timelines imposed on us, and about building worlds—not just imagined ones, but possible ones—where trans people, where all of us, can live fully, safely, and beautifully.
These are difficult times. For the colonized. For the trans community. For artists who insist on telling the truth. But this conversation, like Roque’s work, is a kind of resistance. A kind of love letter. A kind of map he makes possible.
Anjanette Delgado: Algarabía reads as an origin story for trans people fighting against their exclusion from colonial and anti‑colonial canons. How might Cenex’s narrative intervene in canonical history-making?
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera: Anja, thank you for these questions.
Algarabía tells a story about those who aren’t gods, those who don’t have that kind of power. It is a story about vulnerable people, people who get trampled and sometimes survive and sometimes don’t and who still refuse to be tragic. It disavows heroes, but not the idea that everyday things can become heroic, especially if you are trans.
I think canons are about power, and that those who shape history do so against or despite canonicity. There is, however, an inclusivity problem when it comes to trans writers, which is less about us being included in any canon and more about us being included in literature as writers, as people. Just as we are dehumanized by society, we are often dehumanized by other writers who are a part of that society.
In recent years, I’ve seen a younger generation in Puerto Rico lead the fight against this systemic silencing. We are excluded from a space? We make our own. But that doesn’t always mean the space we make has the resources we need. We need to pay the bills, so hire trans writers! Pay trans artists! Invite us to the reading!
AD: I second those exhortations you make. Let’s be inclusive beyond lip service, and all be richer for it.
Algarabía both adopts and upends epic conventions through the voice of Cenex. How do you conceive your invocation of the Muse alongside the disavowal of heroic tropes?
RRSR: Cenex invokes the Muse in order to access his memory. The Muse helps Cenex remember and retell his story, not as it was narrated by dominant discourses, but as he lived it. The Muse also serves as a bridge between Cenex and us as readers. Since Cenex speaks in poetry, sometimes we rely on the Muse’s descriptions for clarity, but these also serve to punctuate, answer back, mess around, etc.
The epic plays by different rules than the novel. Still, I borrowed a great deal from Don Quixote on this one. I’ve always felt Cervantes knew how to make great use of a brief introductory description.
AD: As an experienced translator, Spanish to English and vice versa, I’ve read your work and seen you make choices about where a translation is not needed. About where only the original word will do. With Algarabía, what were your parameters for the mixing of language, if that is what you feel you did?
RRSR: I haven’t written as much as I should on translation because I believe once you make a rule, there will be a case that calls for its rupture. Language is ever-changing. It is simultaneous-in-difference. I may not translate a word in one context, but it might make sense to translate it in another.
Algarabía is a dual translation. It differs from my previous work, where I translate from Spanish to English. While I was writing, something interesting happened. I started to realize I was no longer sure which language had come first. All that mattered was what each language required of me in that particular moment. Its sounds, its most basic structures drew all my attention. I’m not saying language politics were absent, but those politics were happening at the level of each particular decision within the work. It was the freest I’ve ever felt. I was in a trance fixated solely on the Algarabian language.
AD: And one can feel that when reading Algarabía. That freedom, that crazy-expansive space in both content and form . . .
. . . which extends to what we think of as time. There’s a fugue‑like, transtemporal structure to the poem, when it blends past and future in the journey of Cenex. How does this non‑linear temporality critique colonial time, especially as it relates to Puerto Rico’s history . . . and how might this temporal rewriting enable a more ideal, queerer form of futurity for the archipelago?
RRSR: In some senses, Algarabía is quite linear. Cenex narrates his journey, from the past to a moment in the past that is closer to the present. However, that linear narrative is constantly interrupted by his and our present. I wanted to have this play between past and present because trans people and many other oppressed peoples are living out a really fucked up timeline and our present seems bleak, but, now more than ever, we need to know that we have always been around, that we will never be alone, and that being trans is older than time. We are change itself.
AD: My goodness . . . that is so beautiful: “We are change itself.”
One thing I loved to see here was your embrace of “monstrosity” because it is something I love from your earlier books. But here, I feel it functions as an aesthetic strategy, a lyrical tool. How would you say Cenex embodies that wonderful “monstrous” refusal—and what conscious literary techniques did you employ to enact that rupture of cuir subjects in the book from the ways colonial systems “document” histories; oral, language-based, and other forms of cultural storytelling such as dance?
RRSR: Something I made sure to sustain throughout Algarabía was a contrast between what characters say and what is happening narratively. For example, Cenex is called monstrous throughout. He experiences himself as monstrous when he experiences dysphoria, but we have to understand dysphoria is a distortion.
We also have to use our critical judgment as readers. Cenex is beautiful. When he starts to transition, he gets hit on and he feels beautiful, but he is not more beautiful than he was before, just more himself.
It takes a while before we get a detailed description of Cenex. At first, we get to know him by observing how others treat him. We are learning about the world through their reactions. Similarly, “algarabía” originally referred to Arabic. It became a part of Spanish through erasure. Now “algarabía” denotes something excessive and incomprehensible. But who defines what is excessive, what is monstrous? Not those labeled as monsters.
I’d rather think of us as creatures—large, unwieldy, spectacular creatures—who are seen as monsters by those who envy our beauty.
There are certainly some conscious political-aesthetic choices I am making. One of them has had a few names. It has been called “disidentification” by José Esteban Muñoz and “las tretas del débil” by Josefina Ludmer. It is called “syncretism” by some and was called “polyglossia” by Mikhail Bakhtin. It is a survival strategy with an aesthetic flourish. Cenex forms his identity by gathering and remixing fragments, pieces of himself he sees in others, and that is exactly how I wrote the book.
Algarabía is a baquiné for Cenex Algarabía’s deadname, and you can’t have a good party without some noise. La montamos. We built it and tore it down in one night. The sky fell and the pieces told the news wrong, so we danced among them until we were the only headline.
AD: I feel like those last four sentences of your answer are a poem. This interview is giving me life in ways I had not expected.
For a while now, Puerto Rican literature and art have been preoccupied with the failed reformist promises made by Luis Muñoz Marín’s Keynesian “Manos a la obra” (“Operation Bootstrap”) and the political changes of the 1950s.
At the beginning of Canto III, you capture this with a description of Algarabía City’s collapsed urban landscape, which Cenex traverses to reach the nearest Walgreens (Wolgrin) . . . What role does this description play within the story of Cenex?
RRSR: At the end of Canto II, Cenex leaves the suburb of Obregonia and makes his way back to Algarabía City. The journey has echoes of René Marqués’s La Carreta and other literary works that sought to capture the devastating impact of modernization on field workers displaced from their rural communities and pushed to find work in San Juan. But, unlike Marqués’s play, I wanted to show the city in its fullness. I love parts of the city. Among the ruins of failed promises, there is life, there are people who lived beyond muñocismo and are fighting to make a life.
Cenex seeks refuge in the suburbs, but then forgets his stay was supposed to be temporary. As he returns to Algarabía City, he starts to see and recall a lifestyle he had left behind, one with dance studios and traffic jams, with noise and joy.
It was important for me to capture two economic realities, one rooted in a rural, middle-class suburb and the other in an urban working-class context. Just as La Carreta is a good reference for the journey back to the city, Francisco Oller y Cestero’s “El Velorio” can be a reference for Obregonia, and serves as a counterpoint for Cenex’s experiences as a ward of House D’Obregón.
AD: Along those same lines, one of the many important critiques the book makes is economic: how financial power has an outsized influence over the colonized, a political state that also necessitates transition. The language of finance continually enters the body politic, as, for example, when in Canto I Cenex narrates:
It took me beaches
to grasp Poseidon was a person and a place,
just as courts swear companies are incorporated
subjects and patents maim free commerce.
How does the economy impact colonized people and the trans community in particular? Is the economic effect intensified by the political realities trans people face?
RRSR: We live within a capitalist system. That means profit over people by any means necessary. Some of those means are more indirect and managed by checks and balances. Others are more direct and arrive on ships full of armed men.
The political and the economic are not separate spheres of activity. It has long been a policy of politicians in Puerto Rico to offer economic reforms, while treating our political status as a separate issue, but how can it be a separate issue if every aspect of our economic life is controlled by the colonizing country?
The fragment you quote is characteristic of my work. I turn economic policy into raw material for figurative language, for poetry. This both defangs economic language and points to its pervasive impact.
Essentially, Poseidon is the name of Cenex’s nemesis and the name of the underwater experimental complex where Cenex is imprisoned and trained for many years. Instead of just saying that, I use metaphor to emphasize an aspect of what Cenex is describing. Poseidon is the name of a person and a place. Comparably, for decades, companies have been granted corporate personhood, which has been used to argue that a company should have the same rights as a person and to impose corporate interests to the detriment of actual people. This has also been used internationally to override patent protections and flood the local market with imported goods. Neoliberalism polices bodies and personifies fiscal entities.
Discrimination against people of trans experience in hiring practices, and in society at large, means we are often relegated to a reserve labor force or forced to find any form of employment, with little to no benefits and minimum pay. Everything from housing to dealing with government bureaucracy is painstaking and difficult. This benefits capitalism and only capitalism. Whenever there is a reserve class of workers willing to do anything for pay, they are used to break strikes and divide the working class, or to terrify everyone else into submission. That’s why combating transphobia is essential for solidarity and unity.
Being trans in a colony means we are competing for an even more limited number of jobs; we are blamed for the failings of capitalism; we are treated as foreign and distrustful; we are murdered by those who share many of our oppressions; we are scapegoated so that oppressed cis people can experience the short-lived rush of play-acting being the oppressor; and, if we dare gain access to a middle-class life, we are labeled as traitors.
AD: My God, you’ve articulated something so painful, so present, so now, that I caught my breath while reading. I hope you can feel the effort I’m making to not thank you after every answer.
Here is my last question for you, or the last one that fits the space we have:
You have a history of successfully collaborating with visual artists. But I feel you take it to a whole other level in Algarabía, with the final result being actual and figurative world-building. In the book, Cenex inhabits “Algarabía,” a colony that mirrors and reimagines Puerto Rico, and for which you design (with collaborators) a labyrinthine map. Being a follower of the writings of Guiliana Bruno, I must ask about your process. How did it occur to you to unite spatial design with poetic form? Could geography and architecture be used to create alternative worlds safe for queerness-embracing communities? Not marginal spaces—effectively, bubbles—where people are separate, but places where we all accept our own queerness and live in worlds that are rooted in our common reality?
RRSR: I have collaborated with Puerto Rican visual artists for the majority of my books. There is a long history in Puerto Rico of collaboration between writers and visual artists and I see myself within that tradition. For Algarabía, I worked with Natalia Bosques Chico, whose work I’ve always loved. The book design and the interior design elements were a collaboration with Luis Vázquez O’Neill. The map you mention, however, was designed by two architects, Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz García. We have long partnered on various projects.
They read the manuscript and designed the map. We spoke a little about it, but I gave them full creative freedom. I wanted their vision of the Wolgrin. I was incredibly pleased with the results. I love that the city became a domino table. I also love that the labyrinth extends beyond the Wolgrin because the Wolgrin is a microcosm of the labyrinth without. Its structure creates a sense of interiority, but it isn’t entirely cut off from the world. Cenex has to navigate its aisles in order to reach the center and get what he needs.
I can’t predict the future and I wouldn’t want to, but the one thing I do know is that freedom for queer people is tied to freedom for all oppressed people. From Puerto Rico to Palestine, we can’t get free as queers, as trans people without an end to the systems of repression that keep us here. Look at what is happening now. All the meager reforms and inclusivity clauses have been swept away by fascism. If we want lasting, real change, we need to change more than just a few laws. We need to do away with a profit-based colonial, white supremacist system.
Simurgh, the queer-centered community space, is the focus of the last third of the epic. It is what Michel Foucault called a heterotopia. It does not offer us an Eden, but it does offer a space where trans people can come together to care for each other, learn from each other, and guide each other into a future of our choosing.
