Cruzando aguas: la migración indocumentada en la literatura y las artes visuales del Caribe hispanohablante y su diaspora (Editora Educación Emergente, 2025), a translation of Marisel C. Moreno’s Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature & Art (University of Texas Press, 2022), is a most welcome and vital contribution to the fields of Latin American and Caribbean, Visual Arts, Ethnic, and Interdisciplinary Studies. Translated by Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Cruzando aguas… is a critical study of the artistic representations of undocumented migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean and the diaspora. [Cover art features one of my favorite artists from the Dominican Republic, the late Tony Capellán.]
Description (Editora Educación Emergente): With this Spanish translation of Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in the Literature and Visual Arts of the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean and its Diaspora, our ” Otra Universidad” series continues to contribute to the essential archive of counter-hegemonic perspectives, knowledge, and methods on our artistic imagination and production, as well as on the intrinsic connections between Puerto Rico and the Caribbean region to which it belongs, specifically the Spanish-speaking archipelagos of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and all our diasporas.
Furthermore, this book offers a novel and transformative dialogue between the art of words in various genres (essay, short story, poetry, drama) and the visual arts that address the urgent issue of maritime and “undocumented” migration (from the perspective of the modern, capitalist, racist, and colonial state). The result is a regional affirmation of the extraordinary persistence of our Afro-descendant Caribbean peoples, despite the relentless and continuous persecution by those in power.
Marisel Moreno is a professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches US Latina/e/o/x Literature. She is the author of Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland (University of Virginia Press, 2012) and Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art (part of the “Latinx: The Future is Now Series” at the University of Texas Press, July 2022), which won the 2023 Caribbean Studies Association’s Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award and received an Isis Duarte Book Prize Honorable Mention from the Latin American Studies Association’s Haiti-Dominican Republic Section. She is the recipient of the Indiana Governor’s Award for Service-Learning (2011), the Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award (2016), and the Rev. William A. Toohey, C.S.C. Award for Social Justice (2019). Moreno’s teaching and research interests focus on Afro Latinx and Latinx Caribbean literature and cultural production. [. . .] She has co-created and co-organized, with Thomas F. Anderson, the digital humanities project Listening to Puerto Rico. She also co-curated, with Anderson, the exhibit Art at the Service of the People: Posters and Books from Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO), for the Snite Museum at Notre Dame (2012). [. . .]
Beatriz Llenín Figueroa is a writer, editor, translator, and animal and live arts apprentice. She holds a PhD in literature from Duke University. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM). Her research interests include 20th and 21st-century Caribbean literature and philosophy, Caribbean studies, maritime history, island and archipelagic thought, and critical theory. She is also interested in independent theater and works as an editor for Editora Educación Emergente. Her work revolves around the Puerto Rican and Caribbean archipelagos, their ecopoetics and embodiments, and experimental theatre and performance. See articles by Llenín Figueroa at https://www.80grados.net/author/beatriz-llenin-figueroa/page/2/
Book description translated by Ivette Romero. See the original (in Spanish) and more information at https://librerialaberintopr.com/products/cruzando-aguas-marisel-c-moreno
Contact Librería Laberinto at (787) 724-8104 and (787) 724-8200; or write to librerialaberintopr.com
For purchasing information for Crossing Waters… go to https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477325605/
Cruzando aguas: la migración indocumentada en la literatura y las artes visuales del Caribe hispanohablante y su diaspora (Editora Educación Emergente, 2025), a translation of Marisel C. Moreno’s Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature & Art (University of Texas Press, 2022), is a most welcome and vital contribution to the fields
