Macarena Hernández is a multimedia journalist, formerly an editorial columnist at The Dallas Morning News; the Rio Grande Valley Bureau Chief for The San Antonio Express-News; and the Fred Hartman Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Baylor University. Currently, she is an educational consultant and is working on a play about the media’s obsession with the U.S.-Mexico border.

Nelly Rosario is a fiction and prose writer, author of Song of the Water Saints: A Novel (2002). She currently serves as Assistant Director of Writing for the MIT Black History Project and as Associate Professor in the Latina/o Studies Program at Williams College.

desveladas is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award in Literature.

Sheila Maldonado is a poet, author of one-bedroom solo (2011) and that’s what you get (2021). She teaches English for the City University of New York and is working on bloodletters, a book about a lifelong obsession with the ancient Maya.

EL EBANO [excerpt]

My parents never intended to stay on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, the Río Bravo. One day they would make enough to go back to México and work their own fields, even if their eight children didn’t. That was back in the 80s, when those ranchos just across the Tamaulipas state line and in the northern edges of Nuevo León shipped out truckloads of melones, sandías, and sorgo. Back when they still grew sugarcane. But places, like people, die, too. Few people go back these days.

CEIBA NO DE COLÓN [excerpt]

Tell me, Atabey: Why does the legendary Ceiba de Colón first speak to me when it does, through a digitized photograph via the United States Library of Congress, and not in the land where tree and I were born?

May I have your divine permission to return the tree hug remotely, in words and in pictures? Would paying my respects in this way render me a poser, right alongside the man in the boater hat and suit pictured? I mean, as children of conquest, what business do either of us have taking selfies with a ‘First Tree’ so rooted in Indigenous and Afro Diasporic cosmology?

RAISE RAÍZ RAZE [excerpt]

this is the first tree
in our little family
as parts of our family tree fall
we have this actual tree
how long we will have it
we don’t know

it is in the backyard of
the first house in our nucleus
in the larger family
there were others just a few
we just lost
the house in the bronx

Artist Reflection

“Arbographies/Arbografías” grew one leaf at a time. The story of these collaborative tree dispatches by the desveladas collective stretches from New York City to deep-south Texas, entangled not only by history but by ancestral stories rooted throughout the Americas—Honduras, Mexico, Dominican Republic, and the United States. Comprising desveladas are a poet, a multimedia journalist, and a fiction and prose writer. Our individual relationships to specific tree species helped ground visual conversations about the overlaps and gaps in our hyphens, hyphens sprouted from shared family histories of migration and displacement, as well as from our work in multiple genres and languages. Though planted in different places, we come from peoples who commune with trees. “Arbographies/Arbografías” is the outgrowth of our transplanted cuttings, fragments of desvelada conversations late into the night, pruned and trimmed to the nodes where our roots connect. We wrote. We walked. We photographed. We mapped. We planted. And the trees spoke back as ébano and ceiba, Montezuma cypress and maple. We found new eyes, reconsidered what we took for granted, felt Nature as belief, heard the land speak like blood. Our senses, and our sense of what we were taught, were upended. We remembered when we thought we didn’t.