Building off a conversation that began in Knoxville, TN, Executive Director Erin Elizabeth Smith spoke with Diego Báez on his incisive new collection Yaguareté White, where he explores duality, language, America’s complicated relationship with Paraguay, and how writing changes the writer.
Erin Elizabeth Smith: What was the nexus for this collection? Was this always the book you intended to write, or did it change in the writing?
Diego Báez: Surely, the book evolved in the writing, even if I was always going to write about ethnicity and language, race and inheritance. But more than anything, the book changed me in the making. I don’t just mean the process of drafting and submitting, editing, and peer review. I mean even after publication, it’s been wild and frightening and exhilarating to share the book with the world. I guess I didn’t foresee just how meaningfully impactful that would be. I’m so grateful for every opportunity, especially to reconnect with you and Sundress after staying at the co-op so many years ago. It’s wild to think that it would be both another and only six years until I had a title of my own to celebrate. And yet, here we are!
ES: The book grapples with America’s relationship to Paraguay, whether through politics in America’s propping up dictators during Operation Condor or in pop culture, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Miami Vice. Can you speak a little about what you want non-Paraguayans to learn about Paraguay through these poems?
DB: It would be a mistake to think my poems can teach anyone anything about Paraguay per se: I’m not a documentarian, and so much of what I know about Paraguay appears in my poems colored by my own subjective experiences, or filtered through knowledge my father has shared with me, or indexed by an always-biased web browser.
That said, if there’s one thing I hope readers take away, it’s that Paraguayan American poetry neither begins nor ends with me. Take, for example, Hugo Rodríguez-Alcalá, who taught at UC Riverside and published poetry in Spanish throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. See also Clara Elena García, whose Seven Legendary Monsters will be published by Revolutionaries in 2025. It’s important to pin Yaguareté White in its place among a constellation of other Paraguayan American writers, which includes folks like Romy Natalia Goldberg, Cat Galeano, and Lorena O’Neil.
ES: In “English Eventually,” the poem begins “An editor asks for more Guarani in the manuscript.” Can you talk a little about using the “people’s tongue” within the work?
DB: I have a complicated relationship with Guaraní, a language my father spoke in the home, primarily on the phone, our household landline often occupied weekend nights with his emphatic, extremely loud conversations with family in Paraguay. I don’t speak Guaraní, but it occupies a very special place in my heart and mind, and I’m trying to learn more. Some of the poems in Yaguareté White are my attempts to do exactly that.
“English, Eventually” is one of these, albeit one born of what I considered a questionable request to incorporate more Guaraní. On one hand, it’s fucked up to ask a writer to perform greater authenticity, more indigeneity, especially when it’s not really mine to exploit in the first place. Like, part of the point of the book is that my own—and, by extension, the speakers’—lack of proficiency makes them—me—complicit in our ignorance. Neither I nor my speakers are spokespeople for the Paraguayan American experience. On another hand, I’m grateful for the challenge, since it yielded new information I don’t think I’d have otherwise found: the word for “Guaraní” in Guaraní: avañe’ẽ.
ES: At the end of “Capybara Ouroboros,” the poem states “If this must be a metaphor / for anything, it’s this: / the dead end of history // is neither serpent nor rodent, / not meat or fish, man or monument / but each masquerading as the other.” Many of the poems in the collection deal with duality. Can you talk a little about how this idea functions for you within these poems?
DB: Lately, I’ve been most interested in how “bi” seems to function as a prefix of exclusivity: so many biracial and bicultural students, writers, and readers I’ve met refer to themselves as “half-white” or “half-Mexican” or “half-Polish.” And I mean, it makes sense that many of us receive our cultural, linguistic, and ethnic heritage from delineated parentages. But like, bilingual folks don’t speak half in one language and half in another? They speak both languages. Those of us with a multiplicity of cultural backgrounds live through multiple cultures. It’s important to me to emphasize this duality, this plurality.
Paradoxically, the poems in Yaguareté White tend toward the other extreme: resisting definitions of any kind (as in the lines you cite above). I’m reminded of a line in “Invention as Discovery,” an essay by Cuban American poet Andres Rojas that appears in Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (ed. Ruben Quesada), in which Rojas considers this dueling duality: “I wanted to belong somewhere, even if that somewhere was two places at once, but I suspected that I did not belong anywhere.” That really resonates with me, as I suspect it will for anyone whose heritages seem to be at odds.
ES: The book uses several forms of found poems—blog entries, Google Home jokes. Can you talk a little about how these pieces became part of this collection?
DB: The earliest versions of the “postcard” poems were simply ripped from the ’net. Well-meaning white people like to post about their experiences in Paraguay—their semesters abroad, volunteer trips, and mission visits—but the way so many of them talk about the country infuriates me. My revenge was to take their words and repurpose them into poetry. But the actual creative act of repurposing required gentle admonition by several patient friends who suggested that I editorialize the original entries—cut, add, combine, rearrange–and the results are unquestionably the better for it.
In an ironic twist, my dad told me recently that he’s been recruited by a faith-based organization to conduct a “mission trip” (his words!) to Paraguay to spread the good word of sobriety. I’m incredibly proud of his journey and this opportunity, but I can’t help cringing at the phrasing. There’s something hilarious and perfectly fitting about this particular return. I’m sure it’ll make its way into my next book in some fashion.
ES: The final poem in the collection ends in an almost prayer-like fashion speaking to the narrator’s own child. How does the idea of lineage and inheritance function for you as both a poet and parent?
DB: So much of Yaguareté White exists because my child came into the world and changed mine forever. Her arrival opened an entire dimension of the work—in writing, in life—that I didn’t have access to beforehand. No longer do questions of inheritance and heritage operate with me—or a lyrical speaker—as the endpoint, final word, or terminal punctuation. I’ve really had to wrestle with issues of legacy and futurity in ways I never had.
As a result, it was important to me to include her name in the book, as well as the names of other folks who I want to survive: uncles from my mom’s side of the family, the names of my dad’s host family here in the states from when he first arrived as a teenager. In these small gestures, these individuals will live forever, even if I wasn’t always able to show up for them in life.
Other names, I’m not ready to share: my abuelo and abuela aren’t named in the book. Theirs are maybe too close, too sacred, to be spoken. They both passed long before the book found its final form, but they live on in memory, which is a blessing.
Yaguerté White is available from The University of Arizona Press
Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (University of Arizona Press, 2024), a finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Berkshire Prize for Poetry. His writing has appeared online and in print. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.
Erin Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is the Executive Director of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently DOWN (SFASU 2020) and the founder of the Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American.Smith is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
