Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico

As Gabriela shared, Tsunami was published originally 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 want to start a little bit

on that? Sure.

Well, I've known Gabby for many years and I have admired the tsunami, the volumes of tsunami since they started coming out several years ago.

And we did feel, we both felt that it would be, that there was a significant gap in English language conversations around feminism.

that the works collected in the tsunamis could really engage.

And so we started talking like, oh, wouldn't it be nice if, and then that kind of quickly became, let's just do this.

And then this was during the pandemic, I think it was 2020, in December of 2020, 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 kind of a balance and a range that would be representative of the two volumes.

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

I think it took less than a year for us to have an agreement in place and start working on, on the translations.

If I'm not remembering that incorrectly, do you, do you remember differently, Gabby?

No, I, it, it did go, you know, very quickly.

Again, all things considered in the, in the book universe, but yeah, 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 um because um yeah because of what heather just mentioned you know this this wanting to contribute to that conversation And knowing deeply sort of in my gut that the texts that these women have written really would do that.

And then also, what you said about range and the selection, what we tried to emulate in the English language anthology was what I started to do with the first 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 a woman in Mexico.

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

But yeah, it also includes women who've belonged to different you know so-called waves of feminism uh women who come from 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 on 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 mosaic of voices kind of And I think we had a good time and a hard time also, I think.

No, Heather? Trying to select from all of those amazing texts to make an English version that would be and wouldn't be the same as the Spanish versions in the sense that...

it would try to bring together this diverse city, but also now live in a different language and become its own thing.

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

And there was also sort of a material aspect to the selection process, which was I think our initial sort of wish list of contributions ran somewhere around 350 pages.

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

We didn't want it to be the kind of book that would cost $35 or $40 in a bookstore and that would be impossible to carry around.