Writers Mentorship Program mentee Ayling Zulema Dominguez sat down with mentor Ariana Brown to discuss her poetry collection, We Are Owed. Continue reading for this insightful conversation and do not forget to grab your copy before the end of 2025!
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Ayling Zulema Dominguez (AZD): We Are Owed. is your debut poetry collection, and it is such a thorough work of confronting anti-Blackness in nationalist identities, as well as writing about Black kin in very venerative and beloved ways. How did you arrive at the core questions and investigations of We Are Owed.?
Ariana Brown (AB): I was kind of the resident Black History expert in Mexican-American Studies classes. Professors would refer to me for dates and times of certain events. And it was wild to me because I thought, “This department is in the same building as Black Studies; do y’all not talk to each other?” A lot of the questions in We Are Owed. come from that place of frustration. Of being someone who is able to recognize patterns, is unafraid to name them, and goes on to ask people, “Now that we know they exist, what are you going to do about that?” Because as someone who is racialized as Black in every space I enter, at least in this country, I don’t question who I am as a person, the world tells me—that’s what interpolation is, that’s what anti-Blackness is. So, I don’t have these questions of, “Who do I belong to?” Who I belong to is very clear to me. My question is, “How do we achieve liberation?” And I think that requires a certain precision and specificity that, if you are indoctrinated into the concepts of mestizaje and ‘we all have this indigenous past,’ I think can get really lost because you start to play around with the meanings of things, and I think that can get really dangerous. So in the collection, I really do insist on specificity. The meanings of things matter to me. Clarity matters to me.
(AZD): Was there any point in writing the book where there were obstacles to clarity, and if so, how did you approach that?
(AB): One of the experiences that I write about in We Are Owed. was a study abroad trip I did during college to Mexico City. I was the only Black person on the trip, everyone else in the group were mostly bilingual Mexican-Americans who had grown up in the border-towns along the Texas-Mexico border. Being in Mexico City really helped me figure out some of the specificity in We Are Owed., because I do think that if you are a child of immigrants or you exist in the diaspora somewhere and are not living in your ancestral homeland, there can be a tendency to essentialize and romanticize what the experience is of being someone in your homeland is, or what your identity is as a whole. Being in a space where most of my classmates were actually from South Texas, versus me being from San Antonio, I always thought San Antonio was South Texas until I heard my classmates from the valley say San Antonio is Central Texas, and I thought to myself, “Oh, they’re right. I don’t have a right to claim South Texas because living in a border-town is very different from living in a large metropolitan city in San Antonio.” It was important for me to be willing to acknowledge the differences in our experience, because in those moments, it wasn’t useful for me to say, “but we’re all Mexican.” For instance, their parents worked on the Mexico side of the border; they got paid in pesos. I had to be able to recognize, “Yes, I’m the only Black person on this trip, but I have class privilege at this moment because my mom gets paid in U.S. dollars, not in pesos.” Even being in Mexico City and just watching how all of us were racialized differently—most of my classmates would definitely be racialized as “Other” in the U.S., but in Mexico, they were called “gringas,” and they were very confused by this. To them, they were brown, and being called “gringa” felt like a rejection of who they were. But for the locals, they were just acknowledging that my classmates were not from there, and were American. So, there were all of these areas that people might think of as “gray areas,” but to me it felt very helpful to be able to see that clarity, because then I could make sense of things. A lot of the research for We Are Owed. was figuring out, “What are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are? Where did they come from, and what purpose do they serve?” And then trying to figure out what I want my relationship to these stories to be; do I find them helpful? Do I find them hurtful? What do I need to correct? What do I want to be clear about?
(AZD): In your poem, “At the End of the Borderlands,” you write, “would you fight for those you don’t love, to whom you are indebted?” There is such a palpable praxis of care woven into the book, and I was wondering if you could expand a bit on what it means to be indebted to whom we may not love?
(AB): There’s a book that I read while I was writing We Are Owed. called Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods by Shawn Wilson, and in the book he coins the term “relational accountability.” The term is part of ethnographic research and elaborates the idea of ‘nothing about us without us.’ This idea that we don’t exist apart from each other. One of the examples I can think of right now is the genocide happening in Palestine. Right now, it’s the week of the strike that Bisan called for, so I am striking. I don’t personally know people in Palestine, but I am indebted to them. I don’t have to love you to fight alongside you. I think that’s a really key part that a lot of folks are missing. Especially when we come into this idea of social justice through what we see on social media, where everyone feels like you have to be this big happy family, and we have to honor our differences; that is important, yes, but it’s also not necessary. This is something that we learn from disability justice, that people do not have to be loved or likable in order to be worthy of living livable lives. That clarity, that specificity of “I don’t need you to like me, and I don’t need to like you, but I can recognize regardless of what my relationship is to you, you have a right to exist, to not be displaced from your homeland. Especially if the country I live in is actively funding your displacement and your genocide, I have a responsibility to do something, to not just feel something about it, but to do something about it.” Otherwise, what am I writing any of this stuff for, you know?
(AZD): We Are Owed. challenges the notion of identities being tied to nation-states, and the imperial languages that helped form these nation-states, in fact calling for adversarial relationships with nation-states. In your poem “Negrita,” you write, “I fear you offer your heart to this language ... To survive here, mija, I work on the words, making a list of everything we are owed.” What do you think a language that is worthy of offering one’s heart to looks like, if there ever is one?
(AB): The quote that almost opened We Are Owed. was by the Nigerian Writer, Chinua Achebe, which is, "Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it." It didn’t quite fit, but I just love that quote and think about it all the time. I do think that in a lot of non-Black communities, there’s this feeling of needing to learn one’s heritage language, or else being completely lost to it and to one’s culture. And there's a reality to that. But I also think, as an African-American person who has been displaced from whatever my heritage language is for many generations, I think that African-Americans and Black folks in diaspora show us constantly, time and time again, how we have made language our own, how we have made culture our own. When I was a little kid, I used to spend summers with my great grandmother in Galveston, TX, and we would go to church together. Being around Black Baptist preachers, that mode of communication and fellowship is so specific—how one relates to another person in that space, how you participate in that space, how language is used. There are so many different ways to communicate that are beyond the word itself. And when I think about language that is liberatory, it’s not necessarily something a matter of, “I need to find something that is completely removed from a colonial history,” but rather, why can’t that language be tenderness? Why can’t that language be me reaching out to you and us holding each other in this knowing that we are in the muck of it, but we’re gonna hold on to each other no matter what? For me, it’s less about the specific words that one uses. I think we waste a lot of time lamenting or trying to get back what was lost. I think that energy could be better directed towards a real politic of mutuality. I think that is where our future really really lies. I think that’s where all the potential is, in our relationships with one another. That to me is decolonial. That to me is anticolonial. Sometimes it doesn’t quite matter the words you use, sometimes the actions are the most important thing.
“ A lot of the research for We Are Owed. was figuring out, “What are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are? Where did they come from, and what purpose do they serve?” And then trying to figure out what I want my relationship to these stories to be; do I find them helpful? Do I find them hurtful? What do I need to correct? What do I want to be clear about?”
(AZD): As an educator myself, something I’ve always appreciated about your writing is the way you’ll craft lesson plans to accompany your poems. How did you go about crafting the bibliography in We Are Owed., as well as the Teacher’s Guide that goes with the book?
(AB): I love that you ask that because it’s really important to me. I was talking with a friend of mine the other day who is also a poet, and we had this critique of the mainstream literary world, which is that a lot of people in the U.S., poets and non-poets alike, seem to have this idea that the poet is the person who is supposed to critique things. In poetry spaces, however, we have not cultivated a practice of deep study, so what ends up happening is that any poet now seems to feel very comfortable making critiques of things without having done any of the research that goes along with it. As someone who grew up in spoken word poetry spaces, I’ve seen the ramifications of that in the audience. I do think that using words is spiritual. I do think that writing is a spiritual act. I do think that standing on a stage and performing them in a rhythmic manner much like you would a ritual or a spell, it has consequences, and so it is alarming to me when folks are not interested in doing the research, but are interested in being known as people who make cultural critiques. I think it’s really, really important for us to recognize the responsibility that we have as people who work with words. You can do a lot of damage with words. You can confuse people, easily. If you say it in a convincing-enough way, you can convince people of just about anything. So, I’m very cautious and the research part matters a lot to me, because I don’t want people to just take me at face value; I want you to be able to trace my steps. That’s why there’s a selected bibliography at the end of We Are Owed., because if you have questions, I want to encourage you to seek the answers out yourself, and to be able to do so with the resources I reference. That’s my librarian and neurodivergent teacher background. A lot of poetry books don’t come with a Selected Reading list, and so it was exciting for me to think of this as both a poetry book and a classroom text. That’s why there’s the foreword by Dr. Pelaez Lopez, that’s why there’s the Selected Reading list at the end, and that’s also why I built the Teacher’s Guide, where I worked with a college professor, Joshua Deckman, who has taught We Are Owed. in his classes before. He had me do a classroom visit, and had such fantastic lesson plans developed for the book, that I thought, “What if we extended these?” We came up with poetry prompts, keywords, themes, and discussion questions; I wanted people to be well-resourced when they came to this book because I also recognize that the way that I’m talking about Blackness and Mexicanidad is very different from how most people have encountered those subjects. So, I expect there to be some confusion, but as a teacher, I also know that the confusion and disorientation is a key part of learning—that means that you’re learning something. I wanted people to be well-resourced as they move through that disorientation.
(AZD): How does this book fit into your writing journey? How do you think it will inform any future projects that you’re taking on?
(AB): I love this question. It took me six years to do all the reading, research, and writing that this book became. This feels like my Magnum Opus. This book is really important to me and I’m really proud of it. I get really emotional when I think about it. But,, I think that this book was my attempt at navigating a lot of the confusion and questions that I had around some of my very formative experiences as a person. And through writing this, I was able to find clarity, I was able to find a sense of community. In terms of where to go from here, one thing I couldn’t figure out when writing We Are Owed. was how to write about some of the complexities of family. My family is sort of present in the book, but not really. What I’m trying to figure out now is how to write ethically about the violence and abuse in my family. Because some of those stories are not mine to tell, but they have affected me and changed me. I do think that one of the deepest cruelties of witnessing abuse is that it is very uncomfortable for other people to hear you speak about it, so there is a silencing, whether it’s voluntary or not. It’s not “dinner table” conversation, and if you do bring it up, you’re only supposed to talk about it once, as though it’s not a thing that will affect you for your entire life. I have a lot of things that I’m curious about and trying to work out in my mind around this subject, that are of course all related to white supremacy and colonialism and patriarchy. I see the patterns very clearly in my mind, and I want to be able to name the thing, but I can’t be as courageous in naming the thing that I did here in We Are Owed., because some of those stories are not mine to tell. So what I’m trying to figure out now is a bit more of a turning inward. Being able to write in a way that feels clear for me and transparent in a way, while still respecting the anonymity that my family members deserve. I’m branching out into fiction, I’m working on a Young Adult novel. I’ve started writing poems again. I couldn’t write poems for a long time after We Are Owed., but I’m figuring it out again. And I’m going back to spoken word. I want to be able to write the way I speak.
We Are Owed. is going out of print at the end of 2025. If you’re reading this interview and want to re-publish the book, reach out to Ariana Brown. Buy a copy, gift it to someone. Request it at your local library so others will continue to have access.
Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet based in Houston, TX. She is the author of We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). Ariana’s work investigates queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, Black relationality and girlhood, loneliness, and care. She holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies, an M.F.A. in Poetry, and an M.S. in Library Science. Ariana is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion and owes much of her practice to Black performance communities led by Black women poets from the South. She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for over ten years. Follow Ariana online @ArianaThePoet.
Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, mixed media artist, and youth arts educator with roots in Puebla, México (Nahua) and República Dominicana. Grounded in an anticolonial poetics, Ayling's writing asks who we are at our most free, exploring the subversions and imaginings needed in order to arrive there. Ancestral veneration, Indigenous Futurisms, and communing with the archive are major themes in Ayling’s writing. What can language do for our resistance efforts? How can we use it to birth new worlds and weave our ancestors into the fabric of them? Their writing has recently been supported by Tin House, We Need Diverse Books, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Ayling is a 2024-25 Artistic Development and Teaching Assistant with The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, and was previously a 2023-24 UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center Poetry & The Senses Fellow, 2023 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference MFA Presenter, 2023 Prufer Poetry Prize Finalist, and received Honorable Mention for the 2022 Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize. Select poems of theirs have been published in The Poetry Project, The Seventh Wave, The Texas Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. Ayling continues to nurture creative expression among community by hosting free monthly writing workshops online, installing interactive public artworks, and hyping up fellow poets and artists at local open mic joints. Ultimately, they believe in poetry as a tool for liberation.
