AFC+A Founder & Executive Director
Yes, I am pleading with you and I know many colleagues will frown on me for it. Our brown pride can eat away at our fervor and that is that. I promise this is not an inflammatory call to decolonize wealth nor another condemnation of how racism undermines our nonprofit ecosystem. The plea is of another nature and is simple and straightforward. But first hear the story. It’s deeply personal and in its fervor I hope we can –grassroots and grasstops– better find the kind of introspective and intimate understanding systems change desperately needs.
There are costs to the inclusion struggle and in my case it’s my life’s journey and thirty years of challenging, survival-mode led equity work, longing and striving for that place where we may all equally belong to, a place of reciprocity, of mutuality, and shared responsibility in the service of our common good. I could call it justice work–some would call it DEI– but since my first job at eighteen as a Puerto Rican writer and soon after as a published author of memoirs living in the United States I was generating for myself an inclusion pathway in cultural production. Soon after, in my late twenties, I realized my favorite Latino American authors were either going out of print or had never been translated into English. I began my publisher/editorial career for multiple academic presses and launched The Americas book series at the University of Wisconsin Press dedicated to translating stellar authors from Latin America and the Caribbean.
This inclusion work was frustrating as it was redeeming. US citizens live in a globalized world but what they read is almost entirely homegrown. Independent presses and nonprofit presses are the ones publishing most works in translation (86% compared to 14% from the Big Five conglomerate). This has been true since the Translation Database launched in 2008 and is reflected in the number of Big Five titles on the longlists of the National Book Award for Translation, the National Translation Award, and the PEN Translation Award. Of the 25 titles on these three longlists in 2020 for example, only four were from the Big Five. Now, book awards don’t reflect readership numbers. These award winning or shortlisted books are coming from small presses and the US market dynamics are keeping them from a wide readership. In China the top five bestselling fiction books of 2020 were translations compared to the US top five, who were all American.
For each author I wanted to publish I needed to fight an editorial board more often than not unable to see the value and urgency of publishing in translation. The profit bottomline kept gnawing away at my abilities to bridge equity gaps in the academic and book workspaces. It didn’t matter that the data was alarming and the numbers said we had almost no insight into what the rest of the world was reading. Less than 1% of what the United States read was from a book in translation, in contrast to the social democracies of Europe which read above 30% (to top that, 3.8% of what gets published in the US is from a minority voice). It didn’t matter that a democracy is threatened when its socratic capacity for global citizenry is compromised by a lack of multicultural literacy. And that when you consider that this country is a multicultural country, then we are talking about a ticking bomb. There is much to ponder about the health of a nation when its peoples don’t read across cultures. This ignorance breeds bigotry and prejudice.
Nevertheless, my publisher mentor, Dr. Robert A. Mandel, and I pushed through and succeeded in getting 60 plus translations published in the decade between 1999 and 2009. As others working in book equity, we understood we can only truly learn our place in the world by learning about the world — and literature in translation is a most effective way to meet our far-flung neighbors. Ideas are borderless, and the stories we love can come from anywhere and delight people everywhere. As Nigerian poet Ben Okri said, “Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”
But the challenges did not end with the approval of editorial boards. I had to convince marketing departments, book reviewers, sales reps and bookstores to pay attention to a “foreign” or “minority” author. The hard work of acquiring the translation rights for example to an extraordinary, seminal book of a Chilean philosopher was fated to end up in invisibility and a brief shelf life that sabotaged the entire process. What can I say, DEI work in the book industry can be hell.
In those years between 2003 and 2008 as I continued writing and became a mother, feeling the burnout of fighting systemic roadblocks to inclusion work and mothering alone with no relatives nearby, I launched a non profit literary agency to represent and advocate for minority authors. Most days I took my toddlers to Boulder’s Open Space and Parks and roamed the trails for leaves and pebbles to make forest soup. I didn’t know then these places were called the outdoors. For me it was el campo, a place joy could find us the way it had found me in the cane fields and wetlands of Puerto Rico where I grew up and later on in boarding school while tapping maple trees in a New Hampshire’s forest. That joy had cushioned my mother’s death in 1977 and my shame at not knowing English when I arrived in this country in 1979. A New England kibbutz type of school slowly straightened up my spine. Nature and books became my portable homeland. I know I am alive today thanks to the wilderness of New Hampshire’s maple forests and education. At the age of ten, this country of the North gave me Theroux, John Muir, Rachel Carson, and the kind ecological heart of Mr. Arthur Boynton, founder of Boynton School.
Fast forward to 2007. Loretta is three and Lolita is one. We are at the sandy beach of the South Boulder Creek where it meets Gross Reservoir and the river’s wild spirit rushes past me and it suddenly vanishes. You can actually see it happen. The straitjacket that is the dam. I am breastfeeding both daughters while dictating to my recorder thoughts for a new book on generational and national trauma. I am researching the eugenic tactics of the United States government against Puerto Rican women. In 1977 Puerto Rico had the highest rate of infertility of the entire planet. Thousands of women like my mother had gone through unnecessary radical hysterectomies for simple abnormal pap smears. They had been sent home with no hormonal replacement and a bottle of valium, manufactured right in my hometown of Barceloneta by Pfizer.
As I watched that river, wild to my left and gone to my right, I thought of the beach of my childhood my mother so loved and often took me after school. It was a half moon beach covered in seashells and dead fish. My book research had recently taught me that I had grown up in the most polluted region of Puerto Rico and in one of the most environmentally battered areas in the Americas. The largest pharmaceutical industrial complex in the world damned my town with polluted water and toxic chemicals: PAHm TBT, and POP pesticides such as DDT, dieldrin, endrin,and toxaphene. A mile from my backyard swing, Pfizer leaked out methylene chloride gas. Right next to Pfizer, Upjohn discharged into our aquifers thousands of gallons each year of waste material containing poisonous carbon tetrachloride. Fourteen industries determined the quality of the air I breathed and the water I drank. This power was granted in part because of Barceloneta’s underground water reservoirs. The water of my town was so pure that it required little treatment for use in the manufacture of pharmaceutical products. In 2007 I discovered that If an EPA report could be written with a body my mother’s beach would have to be it. It would have to intertwine a historical account of post-World War II America’s love affair with heavy industry with specific details of ailments my classmates and I suffered as we ran down the streets, chasing DDT-spraying airplanes and trucks and drinking water contaminated with lead, mercury, cadmium, tritium, alpha radiation, benzenes, PCBs, chlordane, vinyl chloride, lime, mercury, and cyanide. I believe it was this year of 2007, guided by the dying South Boulder Creek, when AFC+A was born. But bear with me.
In 2009 I published my new book in English rather than in Spanish and it was translated into six languages. I remember one chilly evening of September 2009 standing by a weeping willow my daughters were trying to climb at the London home of my publisher Sigrid Rausing of Granta Books. I was listening to her comments about the manner in which I had depicted my hometown of Barceloneta which had touched her deeply. I teared up. It felt like I had arrived at my workplace -beyond my writing desk- where I could bring my whole self and be valued for who I was. The working life of a writer can be lonely, more so if you are a “minority” voice and writing in a second language.
The feeling of belonging and placemaking began to obsess me and it seemed to intensify with advancing motherhood as if my daughters’ fate depended on it. Shortly after my book tour in Europe I incorporated Americas for Conservation + the Arts as a nonprofit convening home for BIPOC leadership to address and lead solutions for BOTH of these breakdowns in equity and inclusion:
(1) BIPOC citizens make up close 40% of the US population but only 8% of environmental organizations (Green 2.0 Report)
(2) Less than 1% of what the average US citizen reads is from a book in translation vis a vis most of the social democracies of Europe which are reading above 33% in translation. Only 4% of what is being published in the United States is from a minority voice/writer (UNESCO Translation Index)
In 2011 AFC+A hosted the inaugural Americas Latino Eco Festival, now in its 13th edition (with two editions in Mexico-2018 & 2019- and two in Puerto Rico-2018 & 2021) paving the way for thoughtful BIPOC led environmental action rooted in arts and culture. Since then, AFC+A has connected through the festival and AFC+A’s flagship corps Promotores Verdes (Nature Health Workers), an average of 8,000 people each year to the outdoors, created leadership opportunities, and established a workforce pipeline to improve BIPOC representation in the field of conservation.
