RUGE EL BOSQUE

This project fosters transnational and intercultural conversations about how the poetic production of Abiayala/Afro/Latino/America shapes emerging political and literary ecologies; and serves as a grassroots tool for the preservation of ecosystems and endangered languages. So far, we have co-edited two volumes as part of this initiative. In 2022, Ruge el bosque.Volumen 1. Ecopoesia del Cono Sur, gathering poetry written entirely or partially in Guarani, Chaná, Portuñol, and Spanish from the Southern Cone. In 2023, Ruge el bosque.Volumen 2. Ecopoesia de Mesoamérica, gathering poetic expressions written in Guna, Maya K’iche, Nahuatl, Belizean Creole, Garifuna, Yucatec Maya, Spanish, and English from Mesoamerica. Both these volumes are accompanied by scholarly prologues that seek to establish how the subgenre of “ecopoetry” has been conceptualized in the Spanish-speaking world and how plurilinguism challenges this tradition.

Subsequent volumes will include Ruge el bosque.Volumen 3. Ecopoesía del Amazonas, a transnational volume on the Amazon Basin with an emphasis on the Indigenous nations situated within the rainforest. Subsequent volumes will include Volumen 4. Ecopoesía de los Andes, Volumen 5. Ecopoesía del Caribe andVolumen 6. Ecopoesía de la Isla Tortuga.

Ruge el bosque is accompanied by the development of a research podcast, Ecoteca, and a forthcoming digital decolonial map that seek to expand the reach of the anthology volumes by fostering hemispheric dialogues among groups of activists, students, artists, and cultural institutions. This project has yielded the 2024 UTSA Presidential Award to Creative Production and the 2023 NECLAS Best Multimedia Prize. It has also received the financial support of a 2021 Ford-LASA Special Projects Grant and several grants from the University of Texas at San Antonio.