Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico

As Gabriela shared, uh, Tsunami, uh, was published originally, uh, in Mexico, and it has more than one volume.

How did you come together to work on this and create this single volume for Feminist Press? Heather, do you wanna, do you wanna start a little bit on that? Sure.

Um, well, I, I mean, I've known Gabby for many years, um, and I have admired the Tsunami, the volumes of Tsunami since they started coming out, uh, several years ago.

And we did feel, we both felt, um, that it would be, that there was an, uh, that there was a significant gap, um, in English language conversations around feminism, um, that, that the, the works collected in the Tsunamis, um, could really engage.

And so we s- we started talking like, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice if..." And then that kind of quickly became, "Let's just do this." [chuckles] And then this was during the pandemic.

Um, I think it was 2020.

In December of 2020, um, we started sort of mapping out what that would look like, and at that point, there were two volumes published.

So we started selecting works, trying to find, um, kind of a balance and a range, uh, that would be representative of, of the, the two volumes.

Um, and, and we proposed, we started conversations with Feminist Press shortly thereafter, and it, and it actually, it went relatively quickly, all things considered.

Um, I think it took less than a year for us to have an agreement in place, um, and start working on, on the translations, if I'm not m- remembering that incorrectly.

Do you, do you remember differently, Gabby? No, I, it, it did go, you know, very quickly, again, all things considered, [chuckles] um, in the, in the book universe.

But, but also, yeah, just to, to add to that, um, I think when, when Heather approached me with, with this idea, it was just a big, giant, resounding yes, exclamation points.

[chuckles] Because, um, yeah, because of what Heather just mentioned, you know, this, this wanting to contribute to that conversation, um, and knowing deeply sort of in my gut that, that the texts that these women have written really would, would do that.

And then also, um, you know, what you said about range and, and the selection.

What we, uh, tried to emulate in the English language, um, anthology was, you know, what, what I started to do with the first and, and further volumes of the Tsunami, which is to bring women of different generations, of different backgrounds, of different ethnicities within the Mexican territory to discuss what it is for them to be, you know, a woman in Mexico.

And this, of course, includes trans and cis women.

Um, but, but yeah, it also includes women who've, you know, who we- who've belonged to different, you know, so-called waves of feminism, uh, women who come from, uh, you know, some come from academic and literary backgrounds.

Others are more coming from activists, journalists, uh, or, you know, other kinds of, like, more, um, grassroots backgrounds, and a mix of all of that, so that the tone, voice, and, and everything that, that we had in the end would be very diverse, like a mo- mosaic of voices kind of.

Um, and I, I think we had a good, a good time and a hard time also, I think.

No, Heather? Very hard time.

[chuckles] Trying, trying to select from all of those amazing [chuckles] texts to, to make a, you know, an English version that would, would be and wouldn't be the same as the Spa- you know, the Spanish versions in the sense that it would try to, yeah, bring together this diversity, but also, you know, now live in a different language and become its own thing.

So that was really daunting and really, really fun and interesting as well.

Mm-hmm.

And there, there was also sort of a material aspect to the selection process, which was, I think our initial sort of wish list of, um, of contributions ran somewhere around three hundred and fifty pages.

And we, and we had to make the decision, um, because we wanted the book to be accessible.