Review of Black Mestiza by Yael Valencia Aldana

Diego Báez
Nov 11
4 min read

In her glistening first full-length collection, Black Mestiza, Afro-Latinx poet Yael Valencia Aldana plunges headfirst into the somatic depths of her Caribbean, African, and Columbian heritages. Born on Trinidad and Tobago, raised in Barbados and Brooklyn, Aldana plumbs the benthic trenches between land and identity, between past and present. Often, these interrelated themes surface in the profoundly formative, occasionally contentious relationships with her ancestors, especially her mother and grandmother, whose memories live like “salt water in the veins” and continuously shape the “glinting azure edged shores” of her identity.

So often, identity, for Aldana and her speakers, cannot be separated from the terrain and history from which it emerged. In “Talisman,” the speaker fashions jewelry from the purloined cargo of a notorious slave ship: “the Guineaman the Hannibal / dragged out of the green domed / mountains of Santa Marta, Colombia / before it was Santa Marta / before it was Colombia.” Aldana alludes to her ancestral land’s precolonial nomenclature (without naming it) and uses these layered histories to lament the abandonment that apparently plagues her own more recent relations:

Mother, no men stay in our family

they keep on going leaving beautiful dusky sometimes dark

skinned sometimes half-caste children in their wake.

[...]

Lay inside my shell of soul and flesh

We are all in here together

distilled into this one casing of corpuscles.

The turbulent, intertwined legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, European imperial conquest, and personally divergent paths of former family members defines Aldana’s multilayered lyrics as much as “the irregular tumbling surf, now cobalt / blue, now turquoise, now bleach white.” It’s impossible to read Black Mestiza without charting the truly human geography embedded throughout. As a mixed-race woman of multiple ethnicities, Aldana and her speakers embody the beauty, resilience and, yes, scars of the lands they inhabit. Poems often comport themselves to a beguiling corporeal logic. “Open Your Mouth” concludes with a rousing invocation of the elders:

ancestors come to the fore

my mother and I call you.

all of you

from your islands beneath my sea.

this is how we burn next to stiff white Anglican prayer

books

next to Methodist prayer guides with jaunty yellow flowers

next to gold edged Roman Catholic bibles

Ave Maria!

it’s still Coatlicue. It’s still the Oshun

it’s still Yagé Medicina. It’s still Obeah

it’s still Benin Voodoun, clad in crisp white filaments

and wrapped in fire.

By juxtaposing references to white Christian literatures with nods to the Aztec mother goddess (Coatlicue), a Yoruba goddess of fertility (Oshun), diasporic West African religious practices (Obeah and Benin Voodoun), and the popular psychoactive plant Ayahuasca (Yagé Medicina), Aldana invokes the kaleidoscope of spiritualities that crash together to provide her speaker a unique cosmic vantage. Perhaps it is this plurality of approaches to the afterlife that enables Aldana to confront the stark finality of death with evocative clarity and exquisite formal range, as in “Grief in Pink Double Pantoum”:

My grandmother startled me by dying

when told I sat blinking unknowing

trapped in far away in a country supposedly

on vacation, a country of green money

and bright yellow plastic.

The crass simplicity of “green money” paired with “yellow plastic” contrasts against the otherwise rich terrains and topographies that comprise the backdrops of Black Mestiza and work to underscore the speaker’s sense of dislocation from the jarring fact of her grandmother’s death.

Throughout the book, Aldana wrestles with the loss of her grandmother and works to reframe other matriarchal relationships. In “The Sea,” Aldana intertwines seashore and family, like strands of a hoisted halyard, like braids, like eddies:

I still go sometimes. I believe what you told me,

that it is our mother, that I am its daughter,

that a sea bath cures all. I still go

for you. Because you remain in her swells,

formless and nebulous like albumin

pulling apart, coming together

like sargasso

[…]

After, us grandmothers will come out with

those under our protection and start again

like my Boy, your Boy.

He’ll be the first man to stay in our family.

This last inkling of hope opens a new portal for the future of the speaker’s family line, deeply moving as it is and inseparable from the sea per se. And yet, by situating this rebirth in an unspecified future, Aldana leaves open the possibility that the cycle of departures and abandonments does, in fact, persist. Readers must tread the waters of Aldana’s poetic optimism carefully, waters which, like the currents, swell and undulate, appear and collapse in ultimately unpredictable patterns.

Reading Black Mestiza, I’m reminded of the bidirectionality of inheritance: the ways children, of course, take from their parents, but also the way ancestors come to be defined by their descendents’ lives. In lyrics abundant with lush language and verses of unflinching hybridity, Aldana fashions generations of trauma, sacrifice, pain, and resilience into knots, bends, and hitches of poetic brilliance. Recently named one of 50 excellent writers over the age of 50 by Poets & Writers, Aldana surely earns the honor with this work of profound imagery and deep metaphor.

Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (UAPress, 2024). Poems and book reviews have appeared online and in print, most recently at Freeman's, The Georgia Review, and Booklist. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.