Refusing to Mourn: John Murillo's Poetics of Race and Space

Abstract: In this essay, I read Murillo's poetry as embodying a different and challenging form of Afro-latinidad, one centered on imagining the myriad possibilities for articulating Black Mexicanness as a political subjectivity. To do so, I foreground the importance of place to Murillo's poetics, which articulates Black Mexicanness as a political subjectivity not by translating the migrant experience but instead by inhabiting the historical construction of Blackness and Mexicanness specific to the local spaces of Los Angeles and Brooklyn that Murillo has called home. I then offer an extended reading of Murillo's heroic crown of sonnets "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn," the centerpiece of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry . This sonnet sequence, like "Contemporary American Poetry," protests the vulnerability of Black bodies to police violence and laments the impotence of poetry as a response to that violence. Foregrounding the act of mourning—and its refusal—the poem challenges readers to consider what makes a life "grievable," to use Judith Butler's term. To read "A Refusal to Mourn" as enunciated from the position of Afro-latinidad requires Latinx readers in particular to grapple with that challenge on a more profound and, one hopes, transformative level.