“I Am Unhide-able”: Conditions of Visibility in The Poet X

Abstract

Abstract Within Latinx literary studies, young adult literature remains on the margins of scholarship. Yet if the overwhelming popularity of Elizabeth Acevedo’s award-winning novel-in-verse, The Poet X (2018), is any indication, then the genre of Latinx young adult literature offers important insights into contemporary Latinx literatures and cultures. This article argues that The Poet X leverages its multimodal qualities to deconstruct the hierarchies of knowledge that render Afro-Latinx subjects, especially young women, both invisible and hypervisible. As slam poetry allows Xiomara, the fifteen-year-old protagonist, to alter these conditions of visibility in her coming-of-age narrative, Acevedo’s book about the medium—a novel of page poems that are the textual source of performance poems housed online—also manifests social change, for Acevedo’s book has helped to shift Latinx young adult literature into a politics of inclusion and a register of empowerment. By centering a young, Dominican, Afro-Latina woman, The Poet X resists the homogenization of Latinidad by turning to slam poetry as a creative outlet of self-reclamation. Drawing from Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), the article contends that the literary and performatic qualities of the poems in the text demonstrate why Latinx young adult literature is crucial to Latinx literary studies more broadly. Ultimately, Acevedo’s multimodal poetic project extends its account of Xiomara’s slam experience to uphold Afro-Latinx youth, and Afro-Latinx girls especially, as creators of worlds and makers of knowledge that disrupts traditional constructions of Latinidad.