Stolen Flower

From a trailblazing poet, a trilingual narrative in verse that bears witness to a devastating crime and testifies to the power of collective defiance

In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked in her cornfield. The courts ruled that Ascencio died of natural causes. When journalists investigated, they discovered numerous village girls, as young as twelve, who also had been raped by soldiers. The reports sparked outrage throughout Latin America over gender-based violence, oppression of Indigenous communities, and military impunity.

Stolen Flower is Irma Pineda’s powerful sequence of poems memorializing these events and their ramifications. The poems, which appear here in the original Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec), Spanish, and English, are a chorus of fictionalized voices: Ascencio herself, the land, and the community grapple with the terror. It is a lament and a call to action, refashioning the testimonio into a tribute to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and their lands, cultures, and languages.

Irma Pineda (b. 1971) is an Isthmus Zapotec poet, translator, educator, and Indigenous rights activist. She is the author of twelve books of bilingual (Spanish and Didxazá) poetry and three books of poetry in Spanish. She has two previous collections of poetry in English translation: In the Belly of Night and Other Poems and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater. She lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. Wendy Call is a writer, editor, translator, and educator. This is her fourth book of poetry in translation. She is also author of No Word for Welcome and coeditor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide and the annual Best Literary Translations. She lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land.