RUGE EL BOSQUE

Ruge el Bosque is a series of five multilingual literary anthologies that bring together poets from diverse communities on the basis of a mutual concern for the environment. Organized by climate regions, this project is intended as an urgent reflection on the disappearance of natural, cultural, and linguistic diversity amidst a global climate crisis. This project has been supported by a Ford-LASA Special Projects Grant and a UTSA Internal Research Award. The first volume, Ruge el Bosque: Ecopoesia del Cono Sur, includes ecopoetry written in lenguas originarias, along with poetry written in Spanish and Portuñol (Caleta Olivia, 2023). The second volume, Ruge el Bosque: Ecopoesía de Mesoamérica (in preparation) compiles poetry in lenguas originarias, Creole, English, and Spanish from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama. Subsequent volumes will focus on the Guianas and the Caribbean Basin (Vol. 3), the Andean States (Vol. 4), and the Amazon Rainforest (Vol. 5). These anthologies’ goal is to initiate transnational and cross-cultural conversations about the role of Latin American literature in addressing the current environmental crisis, highlighting the ways poetic production: gives form to emergent political and literary ecologies; and serves, especially in indigenous communities, as a grassroots form of preserving ecosystems and languages under the threat of erasure. Two multimodal projects accompany this anthology: a podcast and a digital map. At the intersection of the public and digital humanities, these interventions aim to expand the anthology’s reach by fostering hemispheric ecological dialogues from and about Latin America among activist groups, students, artists, and cultural institutions. As an example, in September 2022, Ruge el Bosque was invited to a dual participation at 2022 Festival Internacional de Literatura de Buenos Aires; with an performance at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, and a conference at the Foro Internacional de Traducción Expandida organized by Looren América Latina.