Meet Janel Pineda of La Piscucha Magazine

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
While I am continuously astounded and inspired by the resilience of Central American communities, it pains me to know that this resilience has always been a necessary condition for our survival. I think, often, about the limitations of my own work as a poet and perhaps also, the limitations of poetry more broadly. Sometimes it can feel futile to be focused on a poem when I turn on the news and see the ongoing dehumanization of Central American lives, or when I think about the very real and dangerous circumstances faced by our people.

But I also think of Audre Lorde, who wrote, “poetry is not a luxury,” but rather “a vital necessity of our existence,” emphasizing the ways poetry enables our survival. I think of the poet and organizer Aja Monet, who rightfully acknowledges: “Poetry alone cannot change the material conditions of an unjust society, but I challenge anyone to name a substantive freedom movement that does not have poetry.” I think of poetry’s capacity to guide us toward imagining better, toward creating better. I think of the poems that have helped me access the narratives and histories that were long denied to me. I think of the risks poets have taken, and the consequences they have endured, to render truths through their poetry.  I think of the people who come up to me after I read my poems and share the way my work has moved them or made them feel seen in some way. We need poetry, now as ever. This is what grounds me in the work I do.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with La Piscucha Magazine – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
I am a founding editor and translator for La Piscucha Magazine (lapiscuchamagazine.com), a recently released multilingual literature, arts, and culture magazine created by Salvadorans within and beyond national borders. This project seeks to create a transnational dialogue between El Salvador and its diaspora in an accessible, online format. Despite all the ways Salvadoran communities have been divided—as a result of war, migration, deportations, and other forms of displacement—I see La Piscucha Magazine as a way of bringing our community together through art. I also think La Piscucha Magazine presents an invitation to those outside of our community to access Salvadoran art and culture, and especially: to understand El Salvador and its diaspora beyond the limiting and often dehumanizing portrayals we often see in media and xenophobic rhetoric. The website features poetry, prose, articles, interviews, and artwork from the Salvadoran community, and is currently available online in both English and Spanish.

It has been a dream come true to work on this project with fellow Salvadoran creatives – especially Willy Palomo, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Efraín Caravantes, and Ruben Reyes, among others. I am thrilled that the website is now live. For the magazine, I translated poems by Josué Andrés Moz, a brilliant writer and friend who I met while performing together in Festival de Poesía Amada Libertad in El Salvador last summer. It’s wonderful to see how much poetry has brought many of us together, and I believe in La Piscucha Magazine as a platform to continue building and strengthening bonds between Salvadoran artists in homeland and diaspora.

In May 2019, I organized the diaspora launch for La Piscucha Magazine, held at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN-LA) in Koreatown. So many people came out to support and learn more about our work. At the event, we were also able to raise funds for CARECEN and SALEF, organizations that are currently doing vital work for asylum seekers at the border. This was especially important to me because this was a perfect example in which our community came together in the name of poetry and art, while also mobilizing in support of direct aid for the broader causes at stake.