Interview with Balam Rodrigo, author of “Central American Book of the Dead.”

By Rey M. Rodríguez

Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar, looms large as one of the first Europeans over five hundred years ago to speak out against the atrocities perpetrated by the Spanish on the Indigenous people living in Mexico and elsewhere. De Las Casas’ book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, attempted to describe the horror and brutality inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in the wake of the Spanish invasion. He tried to bear witness to mass violence through his writing. His work remains as an archive of atrocities, and he exposed the moral failures of Spain, including, among other things, its cruelty. Nevertheless, it remains highly controversial for many reasons, but mainly for its failure to argue for Indigenous sovereignty. He remained locked within a colonial construct.

Centuries later, in Central American Book of the Dead, Balam Rodrigo returns to the same terrain of death, displacement, and memory by creating a palimpsest based on A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and uses this foundation to then transform the tragic history of Central American migrants moving up the spine of Mexico to the United States into a work of art that is more akin to something sacred than a mere documentation of horror. De Las Casas only catalogued the destruction. Rodrigo, on the other hand, creates poetry. The friar tried to convince the powerful to change their ways. Rodrigo’s poetry tries to do the same, but it does so through a different route. He invokes the dead themselves, and through his words, he tries to help them home and engage us to do more to protect the defenseless. He reanimates migrant lives who otherwise would be lost to history and the violence of borders, deserts, and states. He is not attempting to merely document. Instead, he wants us all to remember them, mourn for them, and even resurrect them so that they may find peace.

Rodrigo’s work is not an archive in the traditional sense. It is more like an altar. Through his collection, he has created a sacred space where language becomes ritual. The testimony that he documents becomes incantation. More importantly, it is where the dead are not objects of history but presences that speak in the present as soon as one opens the book. Central American Book of the Dead is both a continuation of and a rupture from the long history of writing violence in the Americas. It is a powerful reimagining of how we bear witness, for whom, and in what manner.

In this conversation, we explore Bartolomé de las Casas, how Rodrigo became a writer, the poetics of witnessing, the ethics of representing suffering, and the possibility of transforming histories of death into acts of dignity, memory, and sacred resistance.

I interviewed Rodrigo in Spanish and then translated it into English. For your enjoyment, we are publishing both the English and Spanish versions.

Balam Rodrigo, welcome to Storyteller’s Corner of Chapter House, the literary journal of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Thank you very much, dear Rey. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Your book, Central American Book of the Dead, is a work that deeply moved me. I even had to go back and revisit the work of Bartolomé de las Casas. I want to begin there: what do you think of Bartolomé de las Casas? How should we understand him in his own time, and what is his importance now, in the time we are living through?

It seems to me that is important because he is the one who begins what we might call an attempt to defend the human rights of any person, especially indigenous people. While it is true that one of the things criticized about Fray Bartolomé de las Casas is that he proposed defending the rights of Indigenous people—their labor burdens, their exploitation, the violations of their human rights, all the extreme violence they suffered in the colonies of the Americas—while suggesting that this labor be replaced by people brought from Africa, that is, Africans, we have to understand the time in which he lived.

Fray Bartolomé de las Casas was far ahead of his time in defending the human rights of the native peoples of the Americas, and that seems to me a central point. Because if we move almost five hundred years beyond the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, today it is still necessary to defend practically the same minorities he sought to protect and whose defense he demanded from the Spanish Crown.

If Bartolomé de las Casas were alive now, he would demand of governments, states, the global world—and especially of the wealthier Northern Hemisphere with greater resources—that they assist, help, defend, and recognize the human rights of all aporias, all minorities, all defenseless people, among them, obviously, people in transit who are migrating, not only from the Americas but from many other latitudes and continents.

Now, could you tell us a little about your own story? How did you become a writer, and why do you write?

I had the idea of writing because I loved to read. As a child, I was born and raised in a very small town where there were no libraries, no access to books, except for a handful of books that belonged to the family. My father and mother were readers in a place where no one liked to read, not even my teachers. The truth is that my teachers did not really read, or only read textbooks.

From a young age, I had a passion for reading, encouraged by my family. When I moved on to university and studied Biology, and later a master’s degree in science, something that struck me and that I took advantage of during my time in Mexico City, at UNAM, was the enormous Central Library at Ciudad Universitaria. I traveled from Chiapas to Mexico City to study Biology, but there I gained access to literature. I was not only studying my biology courses; I was also reading literature.

To forget a little of the hunger and the hardships of life in the city, and to dedicate time to my passion, which was reading literature, I spent hours and many days in the library. Later, I began to buy books in second-hand bookstores. That is how my passion began, my relationship with reading. At some point, I said, “I want to write my own stories too.” At the end of the 1990s, I began to write my first stories. I began as a narrator, writing some essays in science communication, and also some short stories. Later, I began to write what some friends and university classmates told me was poetry. They would say, “What you’re writing is poetry.” And that is how my journey began.

At thirty-two or thirty-three years old, after finishing my master’s degree, I decided to dedicate myself and devote most of my time—besides work—to writing. Now I devote myself almost entirely, professionally, to writing.

And why do you write?

I write out of this urgent need to share, to sing and tell, as Unamuno wrote and Octavio Paz repeated: to sing and tell in another way the same thing, the same human condition, as I have lived it, seen it, or experienced it.

I also write because of those small gaps or cracks I saw in literature—for example, in Mexican or Chiapanecan literature—that had not been written: to speak of Central Americanness, or of the identity closeness between much of Mexico, especially Chiapas, and Central America; and to speak of migration from poetry, which had either not been done or had been done very little, above all with an emphasis on the southern border between Mexico and Guatemala.

As someone who inhabits that Mexican-Central American geographic space, I told myself: I have to write our experiences, because those who had written about this region before were, for the most part, writers from outside it, not native to it. Our testimony was missing. Our word was missing. And for me, that was fundamental. Also, to write in Spanish and in a language that is ours, from this very region of the world, to give greater closeness and greater credibility not only to readers from other places but above all to local people, so that when they read in this dialect of Spanish, they might identify with it and feel part of those stories. That is where my interest began in writing about our own history, our stories, and our myths from my own worldview.

What moved you to write Central American Book of the Dead? Was there an encounter, an image, or a specific testimony that gave rise to the book? Because in the case of Bartolomé de las Casas, it was not only that he saw certain things, but that he read something. It seems that is what changed him was reading the Bible and then realizing he should live differently.

Of course, in my case, what happened is that I wrote a first book that is part of a set of four books that speak about the southern border between Mexico and Guatemala, about what I constructed as a kind of Central American geopoetics, and also about this exodus, this migration, this transit of people towards the United States.

I wrote Marabunta first. I began writing it in 2003, although it was not published until 2017; it took a long time. In that book, I speak of the transit of my own family—my father, my mother, my sisters, my brothers— and also of migrants who were close to us, Central American migrants, and of the condition of the people who live on that border, in that transborder reality.

But I felt I still needed to speak of other migrant experiences, of other migrants, especially some Central Americans who lived with my family in the town of Villa de Comaltitlán. Over the course of two decades, my father and mother welcomed into our house and at our table more than three hundred people from Central America.

So, reading other books about immigration, reading news about migration, I said: this is not something new, and I have to bear witness to these other migrations, these other stories, what I did not write in Marabunta. I decided to write them in another book, to continue, in a way, the saga, the story. And that is how I decided to write Central American Book of the Dead.

The first idea was to write a book only about the dead—about women and men who had died in Mexico during their journey to the United States: to unite with a river of stories, poems, and poetry the Suchiate River, which separates Guatemala and Mexico, and the Río Grande, the Río Bravo; to cross the country with a river of stories, and in each of those geographic places, to speak of a dead Central American person or a migrant in general who had died because of the violence and injustice committed by authorities, cartels, smugglers, coyotes, traffickers, exploiters, police—in short, all those involved in the systematic violation of these people’s human rights.

But when I drafted that first outline of the book, I realized that I could not speak only of death: I also had to speak of life. It could not only be a book of the dead. So, I decided to interweave my own experience and that of my family in relation to some migrants who did make it to the United States and left us their stories, while at the same time evoking and trying to give voice to those people who unjustly died violently along the way.

Curiously, the first outline of the book did not include the voices of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Instead of texts from the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, there were epigraphs and poems by Central American writers. But I was not convinced by how they were presented in the book. So I reread the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, because Bartolomé de las Casas gives his name to the city from which I wrote this book: San Cristóbal de las Casas.

And I realized the enormous parallel, the terrible fact that five hundred years later, injustice continued against the same peoples, the same communities, now carried out by those who also demand similar rights, such as the Mexican government, which demands respect for Mexican migrants in the United States while here reproducing abuses against other migrants. It struck me as paradoxical. So I said: I think I need to intervene and update those passages from the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

When I made the first palimpsest, the first intervention, it felt terrifyingly current, terrifyingly similar. And that is how I began to shape the book with fragments taken from many places: experience, reading, and life. It is a very singular work. I have said this before, but I confess it to you here: I wrote the book in nine days, immersed in the underworld. I slept very little. Of course, I already had the ideas, I had texts, I had notes; I write everything by hand. But the construction of the book happened in the underworld: I entered Xibalbá, Mictlān, and I came out of there with what is now known as the Central American Book of the Dead.

Incredible. I also wanted to ask you about the title, because it evokes something Mexican, American, Mesoamerican. What does it mean to inscribe Central American migrants into this sacred tradition? Could you talk a little about the title?

Yes. Some people have commented—even specialists or academics—that perhaps the title of the book has something to do with The Tibetan Book of the Dead or The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It has nothing to do with those, because those come from mythical traditions and cosmologies outside Mesoamerica.

In reality, the book has much more to do with the Annals of the Kaqchikels, the Memorial of Sololá, the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, and above all with the Popol Vuh, as well as with our own traditions surrounding death in Mexico and Mesoamerica, which are very deep, very rooted in our psyche and our traditions.

There is something important: in the Central American Book of the Dead, while migrants move from south to north trying to reach the United States, in the book, the poetic geography appears in reverse. Because, yes, I speak of the dead, but I speak of their souls, of the beyond, of what lies beyond death. My intention was, in some way, to give voice and life to these migrants so that they might return to their places of origin. That is why Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua appear in that order: because the dead are going back to their origin. It was a chance to say to them: return, come back; let our dead and their souls return home, and to give them life by trying to, also, give them voice.

It has a lot to do with what I have said. In addition, my book is strongly influenced by Roque Dalton, especially The Forbidden Stories of Pulgarcito: that mixture of history, politics, critique, and testimony, bringing forward the sins and crimes of the colonial era and intertwining them with the crimes and injustices of the present. Poets like Juan Bañuelos, Óscar Oliva, Roberto López Moreno, and, of course, Juan Rulfo also influenced me. Because when speaking of the dead, it was inevitable that Pedro Páramo would be present, that great book of twentieth-century Mexican poetry, even though it is also a novel. Those voices from the other world are there, that worldview of ours. That is why I said I wrote the book between Xibalbá and Mictlān. It was inevitable that our Mesoamerican tradition would be present.

And for you, what is poetry?

For me, poetry is not only about writing and beautifying language; about beautiful or lovely song. It seems to me that poetry is the reverse side of the mirror of our language. Everyday language, even politically correct language, is transparent language. But poetry speaks to us about the human condition from the reverse side of the mirror of reality, that part of ourselves we do not want to show in public, the part that strips us bare, that shows what we truly are.

If we compare a poem to a selfie or to a social media photo, those images come with filters, masks, and digital makeup. A person presents themselves as something they are not. What poetry does—and what a true poem does when it speaks of the human condition—is show us naked, as we are, as if we have just gotten out of bed. Poetry can speak of intimacy, of love, of death, of heartbreak, but also of when we come out of a fight or when our hands are stained with blood. It shows what we do not want to show about society and about human beings, from the most sublime to the vilest.

I think poetry has that marvel: it shows us in the full dimension of our nakedness, our misery, and our richness. I remember, speaking of Rulfo, that moment in “Luvina” when the wife asks the husband, lying on the floor of the abandoned church: “Do you hear that noise?” And he answers: “Yes, it is the silence.” It is extraordinary. Only someone with deep knowledge of poetic language can create that. Poetry gives language and reality a greater dose of reality; it makes them more tangible. It makes love, death, heartbreak, and even the most ordinary things in the world feel even more alive.

I agree. The book at times reads like a litany, like a roll call of the disappeared. How did you work with the poetic voice? Who is speaking in these poems?

The idea was that each character would speak for themselves. So what I did was appropriate, or try to appropriate, those voices. People have asked me how I managed to do that. Well, because I know my people, I know my family, I know our town. I have lived there. I worked with my father and my brothers on the streets, on the towns of Soconusco and Chiapas, of Guatemala. My family had to work and migrate in the opposite direction: we would go from Chiapas and Tapachula to Guatemala and its towns to sell things, household goods, merchandise, and on the other side, we would buy contraband goods to sell in Tapachula. In a way, we were traffickers of dreams, traffickers of food, of bread, just to get by.

Knowing that transit, those borderlands, that sort of no man’s land—or rather those places that give meaning to who we are—allowed me to recreate and give different tones, shades, and voices to these people, most of whom were already dead, cruelly murdered. And although it may seem terrible and paradoxical, in one of the poems I speak not only of victims but also I give voice to a perpetrator.

People have asked me why I gave voice to that hitman, that murderous smuggler. Because at the same time that person was also a migrant, and also a victim of an unjust system that forced him to migrate from his place of origin and continue his work within organized crime. If injustice, extreme poverty, and violence had not existed in El Salvador, perhaps he would not have joined the gangs that later persecuted and expelled him, and then perhaps he would not have been hired by a cartel in Mexico to do the same thing, working as a hitman. That is why I said poetry speaks not only of what is beautiful, but also of terrible things. It was complex, difficult, but having grown up and lived in those places helped me a great deal to achieve it.

Many of the texts move between individual stories and collective experience. How do you balance intimacy with anonymity?

The intention was, in fact, to change the names of the characters, especially in the case of the migrants who had died, so as not to use their real names in vain or with morbid intent. So I created names for them, and from those names I wrote a story, based partly on the reality they suffered, with all the cruelty that implies, but also thinking about the longings, hopes, and dreams not only of them but of all migrants.

In the case of migrants who were alive, I did keep their names, because they were part of my family. My mother’s name appears, my father’s, my sisters’ and brothers’, because that shows this community. We Latin Americans are characterized by that: we are like one big family. We fight, we disagree, and then after a while we embrace, raise a toast, share a taco or a bowl of soup.

I think that is also a way of telling the world that, despite our differences, we have hope and dreams, and we can help one another to achieve them. That is what here in Chiapas and in many places in this region of the world is called “comunalidad”: not just something collective, but communal. Hyper-individuality, which we have celebrated so much, does great harm to society. We need to act as family, as people, as communities, as collectives. In that communal sense, it is not only “I help you” when you ask for it; rather, it is: here I am, even if I have to give up what I myself have in order to give it to you, and the only thing I ask is that when you encounter someone in the same situation, you help them too.

That is why in the book these characters had to be given the sense of a people in migration. Curiously, I wrote this book before the migrant caravans “officially” emerged, but in some way, the migrants in the book are already an ancient caravan migrating toward the United States.

And where do you think that idea of community comes from? Do you think it is a deeply Indigenous concept?

I do think so. It is a concept that many Indigenous peoples still share today. We have much to learn from them. One lesson is this relationship of respect and profound connection with nature in general. That does not prevent a person from eating a turkey or a pig they have raised, but there is a recognition of the divine and the sacred in every element, in every being, animal, or person. And that makes respect for the other, for another person, much deeper.

So one does not think only of oneself, but of the fact that, for example, something that harms a tree, or harms a migrant, is also harming a family, a people, a community, an ecosystem. We are not alone in the world. It is like spitting upward: it falls back on you and leaves you blind. That wisdom of Indigenous peoples, that communality, means understanding that what I do has and will have effects not only on those closest to me but also on people or communities I don’t even know.

Here in Chiapas, Tsotsil, Tseltal, Maya, Tojolabal, and other peoples call this philosophy “lekil kuxlejal”, meaning the good living, the good life. And what one seeks is not the good life only for oneself, but the good life for everyone. If we think about the so-called American Dream, I believe it originally had a communal and not just an individual meaning. My book seeks to awaken a little bit those consciences that are lost in the American nightmare and make them think a dream for all the Americas, not only for one.

And how did you structure the book as a whole? I imagine it as a procession, a migratory route, a descent, or an altar. How do you see it?

Yes, as a kind of path. The idea was to feel and to allow the reader to perceive through the poems what people experience in the flesh when they migrate from the border between Mexico and Guatemala, or even from other places. The whole process appears as a long procession, a long via crucis, through which the migrants pass certain trials, almost like the twin brothers journey in the Popol Vuh, Hunahpú and Ixbalanqué. But here, tragically, it is no longer deities or animals who block their path to those who migrate, but flesh-and-blood human beings who should be helping, protecting, giving refuge and asylum, and instead commit violence, atrocities, and barbarism against them.

The idea was to move through different “stations” where one can experience all that happens to a migrant person. And when I have shared these poems in the United States with people who migrated as children or as adults, many have told me, “Change the name to that poem.” Put my name there, because that happened to me.” Then I feel the book is doing its work when people recognize those stations, that thorny road.

But beyond that, I also wanted to say that Mexico today is an enormous grave in which we hide the skeletons of our injustices. A few months ago, I wrote a book about poetry and forced disappearance, and I found that there are more than fifty poetry books, just from Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Chiapas, written in the last fifteen years, that speak of forced disappearance. Our country, which is so beautiful, is also like a huge grave where we hide all the corpses, bodies, and skeletons we do not want to show. It is the country with the greatest number of disappeared people in the world, even though it is a country not formally at war or in armed conflict. And among those uncountable mass disappearances are thousands of migrants. We also had to speak of that reverse dark side of the Mexican mirror.

Have you read Jason De León’s work? He won the National Book Award. He has a book in English called The Land of Open Graves and another called Soldiers and Kings. They are both incredible books.

No, I have not read him, but I appreciate the recommendation. I am going to look for both books.

I think they will interest you a great deal. And tell me, what are the ethical challenges of writing about the dead, especially those whose names may never be known?

That is a very important question. When one writes poetry, one must not forget that it has to be done under a “po-ethics” view, that is, in light of an ethics of writing. In the case of Central American Book of the Dead, I removed forty pages that did not convince me aesthetically, but neither did they convince me ethically. They were poems in which I spoke of other perpetrators and also of some victims, but the treatment I had given them did not satisfy me.

The main example was a poem I wanted to write about a group of Hondurans migrants who stayed at our house for a short time before continuing on their way. I was a child, eight or nine years old. They stayed to rest, to heal their wounds, to eat, to sleep for three or four days. Then they climbed onto the freight train that passed in front of our house in Villa de Comaltitlán. My mother made them bean and egg tacos and gave them food for the road.

A few hours later, a man from the town passing by our house with his cattle told us: “One of the boys who was here and got on the train fell.” He said he was in very bad shape and that we should go see him. He was not merely injured: the train had torn him to pieces. I wanted to write a poem about that. I asked my mother and my brothers whether anyone remembered his name. My father had already died. We did not remember it. Trauma also erases things.

I was not satisfied with the poem. I had ethical doubts. Then I dreamed of a person, an old man, who told me, “You do not have to put that young man in your book. All the pieces of his body are already the poems in your book. There is no need to exhibit his dismembered body.” I woke up and understood that I did not need to display his body that way. I removed that poem and two others that also troubled me ethically. I also removed some letters and texts in which, in some way, I was turning my family into heroes or heroines. I said, "No, we must help without turning my family into extraordinary beings.” That ego had to be taken out, and the book had to be left clean in ethical terms.

But I did not remove all the perpetrators, because we also have to talk about that. Some of those perpetrators are part of our own people. Not everyone is good. We also have to talk about our flaws. And I think we also have a responsibility not only to denounce but to enunciate by giving these people a voice, so that this will not be repeated. Reality is worse than what happens in poetry. I make literature, I write poetry, but outside, in the real life, things are terrible. Even so, there has to be a record of our historical memory, and poetry forms part of the historical memory.

Thank you for that. And how do you avoid anestheticizing suffering while still creating poetry of beauty and power?

To distance myself from referential language—whether journalistic, historical, or statistical—in some poems, I include the exact latitude where a body or remains of a dead migrant were found, but I give that person a name in order to humanize the language. I think poetry, through the art of language, rehumanizes these events. If, for example,  these facts are recorded by an immigration agent, a politician, a bureaucrat, or even a journalist, they often remain as archives, as referential or official documents. But once literature touches those events, they become timeless.

Perhaps in twenty years someone will search in a newspaper to find out what happened in our era, but perhaps a poem will tell them more about the humanity of those migrant people than a statistic or a number ever could. That is why it mattered to me to appropriate journalistic language, forensic language, the language of the criminals themselves, the codes of traffickers, their slang, and at the same time to bring beauty to it while also working with ordinary language, the language of everyday people, so that any person—a migrant man or woman—could feel close to it. If I had used overly rhetorical language, it would have been too far removed from anyone’s experience. And I could not forget that I was writing poetry and not something else.

And does writing this kind of poetry put you at risk?

Yes. Curiously, I will tell you two stories. The first time I presented this book in Mexico was at the Casa del Migrante in Saltillo, Coahuila, with Father Pedro Pantoja, defender of migrants and founder of that shelter. He presented Marabunta and Central American Book of the Dead. He had been threatened by Los Zetas; they had already tried to kill him more than once.

When I went to Coahuila, I gave a workshop and a talk at the migrant shelter. Jorge Dalton, filmmaker and son of Roque Dalton, accompanied me. Men working as lookouts for Los Zetas also attended the event. Father Pantoja told me so very clearly: “There are two bastards here who are lookouts.” He told me not to be frightened, that they had come to hear what we were going to say, to see what we were going to do, and above all to keep an eye on the migrants.

What was striking is that in the end, those two lookouts bought two books from me: one for the boss, which they asked me to dedicate, and one for themselves. They even told me, “Why don’t you write banda songs or corridos instead? That would make you more money.” And then they added, “It’s good that you talk about us [Los Zetas] in your book, because we wouldn’t have liked it if you talked about the others. We’re the ones who run things here.” I found that very curious.

But the people who have really threatened me are some institutions and government officials. It is not that I “speak badly” of immigration agents or institutions like COMAR or the INM; I speak some truths that have come to light about their ties to organized crime. And that is terrible, because we pay public officials and politicians with public money to work for human rights, and many of them hand migrant people over to organized crime. The threats, the hostility, and the harassment I have received have come from those government institutions. That is the great paradox: those who are supposed to protect us are the ones who feel offended when one tells the truth about corruption or tries to make public a reality that they themselves already know.

And to end, do you have any suggestions for poets or writers who are just beginning?

Yes. I’m going to give you some references. Especially here in Chiapas and Oaxaca, there are great writers working in Indigenous languages on these themes and others that are equally relevant. I can put you in touch with them. I’ll also send you their names and share some of their literary work so that you can interview them as well.

Very good. Balam, a pleasure. It is an honor to meet you and learn about your extraordinary work.

 An embrace, Rey, an embrace.

Central American Book of the Dead/Libro centroamericano de los muertos (Ala Ediciones, Colección Knórozov, Chiapas, México, Second Spanish Edition 2022, First English Edition 2022, First Reprint 2026, 284 p.) ISBN: 9798364917737

Central American Book of the Dead (Flower Song Press, McAllen, Texas, USA, 146 p., 2023). ISBN-10: ‎195-3447392 /  ISBN-13: 978-1953-447-39-5

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City. His poetry collection, Todos Somos Sagrados/All Are Sacred (El Martillo Press), will debut in May 2026. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and the Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop,Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and U.C. Berkeley Law School.