The Poet Carries the Mail: What Yael Valencia Aldana’s Black Mestiza Delivers
As members of Congress propose laws to withhold their own salaries until federal budget issues are resolved, I consider what a poet who is also a postal worker can teach us. I have kept notes on Yael Valencia Aldana’s Black Mestiza: Poems for a couple of years now, wondering how I, a scholar who writes poetry without studying its theories or trends, can begin to make sense of the messages Black Mestiza delivers to each reader. When Valencia Aldana told me she had taken a job as a postal worker, I asked her: Who says postal workers can’t be poets, or that poets can’t be postal workers?
“Who says postal workers can’t be poets, or that poets can’t be postal workers?”
Black Mestiza, the collection by the Pushcart Prize-winning poet, still delivers. Her poem “Why don’t you write about joy?” speaks to the weight of generational trauma that, amid global crises of intervention and human rights abuses, rings true for so many of us. Lines like “Because my mother was torn from her mother and went crazy./ Because my grandmother lost her daughter and went crazy” speak as much to Valencia Aldana’s understanding of her own generational trauma as to the crises many families across the Americas and around the globe are living through today.
To be ripped apart from the people who carried us and nursed us drives us crazy precisely because it breaks the link of nurturing. No matter when or how we are torn from each other, parents and children risk becoming untethered from their humanity when they are separated. Valencia Aldana brings the difficulty of writing about joy to our guarded attention because she, like so many of us, carries the legacy of being torn from the people who birthed us.
We used to rely on postal workers to deliver boxes of joy, mementos, letters filled with memories and good fortune, and birthday cards full of money. In much the same way, Valencia Aldana’s poems arrive in the mailbox of our spirits to save us from the complacency so many of us fear in this moment.
“Valencia Aldana’s poems arrive in the mailbox of our spirits to save us from the complacency so many of us fear in this moment.”
In “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” Gloria Anzaldúa explains that “writing saves me from this complacency I fear. . . . By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. . . . I write to record what others erase when I speak” (30). In much the same way, Valencia Aldana writes repair and renewal into her ancestral legacies in poems like “Black Mestiza” and “Angela Davis was in my Car.”
In “Black Mestiza,” she writes that her grandmother’s lineage made her a proper mestiza. What’s more, “she gained her Black off country/on twin island shores, bobbing in the Caribbean Sea,” by way of Valencia Aldana’s Afro-Caribbean grandfather. On leaving home and having her passport stamped “white,” Valencia Aldana explains, her grandmother lost her ties to her home in Colombia. The tearing apart of grandmother, mother, and child moves in this poem from the geographical to the historical and political: the state made her “white” in her passport, despite her “indigenous face and two thick braids.”
In titling the poem “Black Mestiza,” Valencia Aldana tells us that she was told she, like her grandmother’s lineage, did not exist. She records what few books and fewer archives capture of her embodied experience: that she, a Black Mestiza, does exist. She puts order into her world, humanizing the uncertainty that authors of banned books, along with scholars and educators grounded in politically unsupported disciplines, are navigating. In that navigation, potential projects are often placed on hold, because the histories of our students and our greater communities, and their safety and security, shape and inspire our work.
“She records what few books and fewer archives capture of her embodied experience: that she, a Black Mestiza, does exist.”
Valencia Aldana expands on her commitment to bring order by resisting erasure in “Angela Davis was in my Car.” She writes that she told Angela Davis, “I write about forgotten women/my mother, my grandmothers,” and that Davis responded, “Get on it Girl.” Italicized for effect, Davis’s reply highlights the power of Black women who survive despite the statistics, and who commit to resisting the separation and spiritual starvation of a people who continue to dream of living in full, without our freedoms or livelihoods at risk.
Valencia Aldana and I revisited the daily negotiations this survival requires in the weeks following the 2024 election results. As much as we suspected how events would play out in national and international political arenas, we did not know what they would deliver to us.
At the end of 2024, Valencia Aldana explained that making sure she and her son were safe was her priority. I was optimistic, given the strength and enduring power of Black Mestiza. I was working on bringing the collection into conversation with Anzaldúan thought and Black feminist conjuring, and falling short because of the breadth and depth I still needed to explore in poetry studies. Valencia Aldana hit the academic job market hard, promoting her collection where and how she could. With budgets shrinking and institutions focused on self-preservation, the invited talks were few and the job prospects fewer. Like so many mothers, she put survival first. As much as she wanted to teach and write, becoming a postal worker was what allowed her to take care of herself and her family.
“As much as she wanted to teach and write, becoming a postal worker was what allowed her to take care of herself and her family.”
In the months since I last recorded or handwrote verses of my own, coming back to Black Mestiza has served as a reminder to check the mailboxes of memory and to support the postal workers of resilience and optimism. I look forward to what postal work will contribute to the everyday poetry Valencia Aldana finds in fleeting, fugitive interactions, like those in “Sister Beloved, Brother Beloved” and “Spanglish to Spanish.” And I come to her poems as I would to the handwritten letters of long-lost loves and forgotten friends: to re-member what this political moment threatens to tear apart, and to remember the rule of good, strong nurturers: “When you are in trouble, call me./ I can get there faster than before.” And whether over the phone or in prayer, they, and we, do.
“I come to her poems as I would to the handwritten letters of long-lost loves and forgotten friends: to re-member what this political moment threatens to tear apart.”
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