Giancarlo Huapaya © Becka Ranta
In Giancarlo Huapaya’s poetry collection [gamerover], the Arizona State Fair behind his Phoenix home and the open desert of the Tornillo Detention Centre are not incidental settings. They are breathing terrains, almost living characters that echo the settler-colonial recreation, white supremacist spectacle, and anti-immigrant violence across the Sun Belt region of the United States. As a poet-translator, I was eager to speak with Huapaya about this work of place-based writing. What began as one night’s encounter with a gigantic Ferris wheel lighting up his new neighbourhood had, over seven years, become a book that considers arrival itself to be part of a landscape. The romanticised landscapes we are sold, Huapaya shows us, were never pristine or free from politics.
Building upon archival fragments (fair posters, laws, films, tourism propaganda), he invites introspection that pulls the rug out from under official histories and reveals the warped images they cast upon both native land and migrant bodies. The poem becomes a game board, using visual poetry and the avatar figure to unpick how identities are contrived within oppressive spatial structures. As he writes in “Trayectorias en el juego”: “Las trayectorias emergen a través de la creación de nuevas cartografías, pero los mapas muchas veces son productos estáticos que no exponen las temporalidades que constituyen una memoria.”
In this conversation, I spoke with Huapaya about the documentary poetics of exhuming ruins, the avatar as a lens for navigating racialised spaces, and how to look at the landscapes we think we know to see the engines of power behind all the spectacle.
—Alton Melvar M Dapanas, February 2026
Alton Melvar M Dapanas: Giancarlo, I’d love to start with your poetry collection [gamerover] (translated from the Spanish by Ryan Greene, Deep Vellum, 2025), which, I must say, is a text of place-based writing. In the book, the State Fair in Arizona and the Tornillo Detention Center in Texas behave as sentient characters. How did these specific sites become such a critical lens for you? I’m interested in how they refract those intertwined histories of recreation, power, and racialised violence that shaped the American Sun Belt as we know it today.
Giancarlo Huapaya: As you mention, Alton, [gamerover] is place-based writing in which I investigate trajectories of white supremacy in Arizona from the vantage point of one neighbourhood in central Phoenix. I wrote this book over a period of seven years, and it was originally published in Spanish in Lima, Peru, in 2023. Last year, the English version came out, translated by Ryan Greene.
The writing began to take form one night when I went out into my backyard and found myself facing a gigantic, bright Ferris wheel lighting up my whole neighbourhood. I had arrived in Phoenix only a few months before, and my house was at the edge of the Fairview Place neighbourhood, backing up to a huge concrete block called the Arizona State Fairgrounds. In addition to the State Fair, which was the site of one of the largest gun shows in the West, five times a year. In that liminal space, on the first day of the State Fair in 2015, this rotating object (which in Spanish is called “rueda de la fortuna,” or “wheel of fortune”) confronted me and guided me into a historical and phenomenological investigation into the colonial legacies of fairs and expositions, as well as spaces of spectacle, entertainment, and so-called leisure.
Objects do not have an existence independent of the points from which they are seen, nor of the points in which they have been before, to paraphrase the queer phenomenologist Sara Ahmed. An object bears inscriptions in its contours, folds, and scales resulting from its uses, relations, histories, and trajectories. How did this object enter into my field of vision, and how is it relating to me? Upon beginning to investigate the trajectory and the history of the wheel, I found that the first time it was constructed at that scale was at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893: a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the beginning of Columbus’ invasion of the Americas. In that space of propaganda and recreation, the wheel turned alongside human zoos and exoticised, misogynistic spectacles which served to build up an ideal of white masculine power. That wheel spun to suggest that empire was fun. The next time it turned was at the St. Louis World’s Fair, at which over 1,000 people from the Philippines were put on display in an exhibit meant to demonstrate what constituted the “primitive” in relation to the so-called “civilised” audience members. This is a colonial legacy designed to establish racial hierarchies and program ideals of progress and prosperity that are still operational.
Part of the writing of [gamerover] also took place in El Paso while I was in an MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Texas. In mid-2018, the child detention centre in Tornillo opened, about 40 miles from where I studied. It was basically made up of tents in the middle of the desert. Children who had been separated from their families were imprisoned in cages and exhibited. The manner in which something or someone is exhibited conditions the way in which that something or someone is perceived. This is not part of the past. This is the present of a continuous horror. From the first Trump administration to the current one, there are patterns that have only intensified in their strategy, violence, technologies, and budgets, under a brand of racism and authoritarianism.
[gamerover], translated into English by Ryan Greene
(Dallas, Texas: Deep Vellum, 2023)
Dapanas: I like how [gamerover] incorporates autobiography, visual culture (like John Ford’s films and Arizona tourism ads), and the archive. Your use of documentary poetics seems designed to unsettle ‘official’ histories and exhume what you call ‘las ruinas que se ocultan.’ Could you talk about how this approach allows you to contest dominant narratives and bring those hidden ruins back into view?
Huapaya: A point of departure for [gamerover] was Kaia Sand’s Remember to Wave, in which the poet asks: “How do I notice / what I don’t notice? // How do I notice / what I don’t know / I don’t notice?” Sand investigates histories of incarceration and labour in a neighbourhood in Portland, Oregon, and proposes participatory walks toward a critical cartography to make visible the ruins that occlude, together with the community. Historically, mapping has been a fundamental strategy of settler colonialism and imperialism. Through mapping’s reductive, static, and unidirectional nature, meanings of property came about, turning the earth into commodities and borders. Indigenous sovereignties and nations were stolen through processes of colonial mapping, which promoted extractivism and exoticization. [gamerover] responds as a counter-map in poetry, through which I peel back historical layers and bring into relationship the orientations of my own body with the landscape and language of the place to create a tension with representations and formations configured by the habits of hegemonic producers of space and culture.
This search for reorientation was the impulse behind the writing and research for the book, in which I also propose a recombination of archives and a temporal simultaneity whose collectivity and fragmentation destabilise given historical successions. In this documentary process, I convene within the page of the poem quotations from essays, other poems, news reports, journalistic investigations, tourist media, dialogue from film and animation, songs, bureaucratic and legal texts, political speeches, interviews, dictionary definitions, descriptions of visual archival materials, maps of disparate time periods and technologies, and advertising language. All this is presented as its own archive, which is simultaneously a community of thought about the formation of the place.
Dapanas: The figure of the ‘avatar’ runs through the collection in such a provocative way. It is both a digital proxy we choose and a socially inscribed identity we simply inherit. How does this operate in the ‘game’ of navigating Phoenix as a migrant poet in such a racialised society? What possibilities does the avatar open up for you?
Huapaya: The avatar generates different dynamics across the multiple layers of the poem. It transits through the text, figuring and disfiguring, entering and exiting, and inhabiting mental and metaphorical spaces: a simulation that creates a clash between the stability of the medium and the weight of what it says. The avatar functions simultaneously as an accumulation of one’s representations (but without you, to replace you and place you under the domination and imposition of a racialised value) and as a metapoetic proxy that one employs in order to have a corporeality within the page of the game. In the field of social representation, beliefs are influenced by all of the inputs we have been given. In the space of the flow of our virtual interactions, consensual or not, these inputs become aligned with commercial objectives to obtain consumer certainty, and with political ends to manipulate and maintain hegemonies of power.
Algorithms and information systems are not neutral. By combining to develop cognitive and intellectual capacities and expressing those in empathetic tones, they create conditions that neutralise personal decision-making. In the face of this, the avatar on the page also materialises as a process and a dynamic. More specifically, it suggests fragments of a trajectory that perturbs the incarnations of idols, taking into account the avatar’s mystical meaning, which has been speculated upon.
Another important dynamic takes place in the development of the accumulation of relations that play out as tensions between “the point that’s still and the one that moves” across time. In one sense, the point that’s still is that which has been fixed and becomes invisible because it has been normalised. A point that’s still might be something that once happened, but because of its repetition, it has become structure. It becomes necessary to put it in relation in order to see the present in a more holistic way. The point that moves is the intervention of the avatar through the experience of the operator, the poet, who moves in order to view the stationary point from distinct perspectives and to shake it, link it, and expose it. This intermittent role decenters trajectories, but at the same time, it makes mismatches transparent. At the end of the day, we are still the “behind” of our avatars in this version.
Dapanas: If hegemonic structures, such as colonial legacies, border regimes, and racial-capitalist hierarchies, undergird the ‘game’ in [gamerover], then who or what is the ‘player’? Is it the poem’s persona, the migrant body, the reader, or perhaps the forces of history themselves? And, ultimately, what does it mean to declare this particular game ‘over’?
Huapaya: In the title, [gamerover], there is a play of meanings: gamer/over, game/rover, and gamer/o/ver. These readings could suggest a continuous hopelessness, but at the same time, they offer an understanding that we are inside a loop of patterns that block equal play. The “gamer” is presented in a state of loss or a fallen state that represents a series of categories created by the “game.” This game represents a system that determines, for example, who is the immigrant and who is the explorer, who is the sensor and who is the examined, who is the pursuer and who is the pursued, who is criminalised, and who is the researcher and who is the studied. In another possibility, “gamer/o/ver,” the division emphasises the act of looking (in Spanish, “ver”). This refers to positioning a movement, a performance, a transit, a panorama, and an imbalance on the page while pointing to the nature of those tools of gaze-making: exhibition, spectacle, outdoor recreation, hunting, and the audiovisual products of cinema, television, and propaganda. It also encompasses urban design, landscape photography, and visual art, all in conversation with my representation as an immigrant as seen from the perspective of others.
From the opening poem of the manuscript in the section “Twofolding,” the reader notices the text’s visuality and the exercise in observation through which I aim to make evident the way in which visual configurations determine how the movements of some restrict the movements of others. One work from which I learned a great deal in relation to looking at our surroundings was Jena Osman’s Public Figures, an investigation of the “gap between sight and site.” I interpret “gap” in the sense of distance, emptiness, or a hole, but also as silence. Osman maps military statues carrying weapons in Philadelphia to speak about relative positions, the normalisation of militarisation in public spaces, the complicity of our dormant visual sense, and the power of monuments to erase and manipulate records.
Sub Verse Workshop, translated into English by Ilana Dann Luna
(New Orleans, Louisiana: Dialogos Books, 2020)
Dapanas: Another poetry collection of yours, Taller Sub Verso – published in different Spanish-language editions in Peru (2011), Mexico (2014), and El Salvador (2016) and translated as Sub Verse Workshop (2020) for Dialogos Books – is, true to its name, a workshop. It uses an abecedarian structure where body, identity, and language undergo Neobaroque and performative mutations. If that book treats the body as a site for subversion, [gamerover] seems to treat Phoenix and Tornillo as similar workshops. How do you see that transformative logic shifting when the focus moves from the intimate and the erotic to the expansive, often violent body of a place like the Sun Belt?
Huapaya: It’s interesting the way in which you link and compare both books. I wrote Sub Verse Workshop when I lived in Lima, which is where I was born and grew up. It was published in a first handmade cardboard (or cartonera) edition in Paraguay in 2011, in the context of the first Mercosur Cartonera bookfair. After several versions and revisions (in the style of a workshop), the book was published in English in the United States in 2020, beautifully translated by Ilana Luna. While in [gamerover] I explore fragmentation through the flow of a collectivity of writings to investigate a “second skin” (to borrow from Sara Ahmed), which is the space that we inhabit. Sub Verse Workshop examines fragmentations through extensions of bodily organs and their biopolitical reactions. It is also conceived as a book of relationships and interchanges, emerging from a dystopian imagination to deprogram binary affects and activate a hybridisation through the “invasion of folds of language,” as the great Latin American Neobaroque agitator Néstor Perlongher would say. At the same time, the format of the abecedarian is a series of spaces of mutation that allow us to explore our elasticities toward a new syntax of a shared body.
[gamerover] and Sub Verse Workshop both open possibilities for intervention in their visuality and fabric to generate rhythms that simultaneously give the sensation of friction, interruption, and sequence. They differ in scale but coincide in maintaining current processes of un-writing to create more flexible access, consignments, and interchanges with the archive of the body and the archive of a place.
Dapanas: I find your work as a translator into Spanish as a compelling counterpoint to your original Spanish poetry. You’ve brought major works of English-language documentary poetics into Spanish: Susan Briante’s The Market Wonders (2016) and documentary poetry’s foundational text, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938). As a poet working in that mode yourself, how does the process of translating this genre reconfigure your own toolkit: the archive, testimony, and fragmented chronicle? Does this translational labour feel like an extension of your own poetic project, or a separate conversation entirely?
Huapaya: It is a continuity. I translate based on proximity and focus on works that have lived alongside me and have generated an affective connection. The way in which I approach a work affects the way in which I translate that work. I think of the translation of poetry as a multitude of searches, explorations, and arrivals that activate risks within the operator in the face of notions of the original and of originality. Every experience with the work of versioning or rewriting another’s work in another language is distinct, because you learn as you go how to share new breaths, materialities, densities, and values: forming a textual body that plays in the reflection and, at the same time, moves with its own flexible and deformed qualities.
In this sense, it has been enlivening to translate these two masters of documentary poetry, Muriel Rukeyser and Susan Briante, both of whom are central to my work of “extending the document,” as Rukeyser said in her pioneering work, The Book of the Dead. This is a work impelled by ideological thought that offers prompts for investigation, poetic commitment, and the ethics of transparency and the limits of representation to this day. I translated Susan Briante’s The Market Wonders (El mercado se pregunta) into Spanish as I wrote [gamerover]. These parallels surely affected the ways in which I conceived of the documentary process and the ethical conditions of writing and translating in relation to one another. Part of [gamerover] attempts assemblages of “transcreations” (a term conceived by the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos in relation to the practice of poetry translation) that possess a certain visuality on the page. I avoided falling into the isolation, misrepresentation, or decontextualization of sources, aiming rather to strengthen a discourse that would be coherent and would complement the denunciations that the book presents. At the same time, I considered the extractivist and exoticizing implications that institutions and the academia have imposed toward the gain of symbolic power.
Although at that time I was pursuing an MFA, which was made up almost in its entirety of Latin American writers, I decided not to continue with a career in academic institutions. The appropriation of archives and of thought about migration and documentality has been a constant among those who aspire to be institutional experts: those who often receive credentials and visibility even as they engage in no form of activism or clear community action to contribute toward change. As I wrote [gamerover], I sent out a call to my community of migrant poets who lived in Phoenix, who wrote in Spanish, and who had no institutional affiliation, asking them to share their ideas in poetry about the city. Part of the book is also constructed of those thoughts in community.
Cardboard House Press
https://cardboardhousepress.org
Dapanas: In an interview with Juanita Heredia for Mapping South American Latina/o Literature in the United States (2018), the poet Farid Matuk praised Cardboard House Press, for expanding the shelves of U.S. readers with ‘socially committed and formally innovative poetries’ from Latin America and Spain, beyond the canon. I’d love to hear the story of how the press came to be. Given that your catalogue is clearly curated around radical and politically resonant voices, how would you define the editorial philosophy that drives Cardboard House Press today?
Huapaya: We founded Cardboard House Press in 2014. It started as a series of community poetry and cartonera bookmaking workshops in Bloomington, Indiana, and soon after became a publishing house for poetry in translation that publishes works by authors from Latin America and Spain. We are now based in Arizona, but we also work out of Providence, Rhode Island, where we share space with des/centro de poesía, which organises poetry readings in Spanish. At Cardboard House Press, we are interested in poetics that dialogue with and investigate formations of society, politics, climate, cartography, and language, and that shift the focus toward other sensibilities. One premise in founding the project was to shake off any given notion of what “Latin American literature” “was” in the United States. What happens when such an immense variety of works are consigned to that single category, and moreover, represented by a handful of visible and recognisable poets in a foreign language? It’s even something that we question internally in our practice: is it worth insisting on this category, as a sort of panorama, when our scarce resources enable us to publish only around seven titles a year? Would it be more coherent to dedicate ourselves, for extended periods, to publishing, for example, only contemporary poetry written by Peruvian women? We’re always conscious of how the large scale can cause a loss of focus, and of how the act of translation also contributes to forming canons.
The focus of Cardboard House Press is not only on publication. The project has also served to create spaces for language justice. In our community workshops, we make cartonera books by hand with recycled materials, as well as chapbooks that use diverse printing techniques including screen printing, letterpress, block printing, stencilling, and digital printing. In these workshops, bilingual communities take form in which we read poetry in the original and in translation, and we talk about it. In 2019, in the Tripwire pamphlet series, we published a collaborative history in the form of a manifesto about our experience, which is available for free download. Cartonera books historically have been containers for poetics, and the form has various origins in Latin America. Two of those are Taller Leñateros in Chiapas, led principally by Mayan women since 1975, and Eloísa Cartonera in Buenos Aires. The latter is perhaps the better-known origin point, and it began in 2002 as a cooperative responding to the crisis in Argentina at that time. We consider Cardboard House Press to be inscribed in that tradition and genealogy.
Dapanas: We find ourselves at a time of intensified border control, from mass deportations in the States to the Canadian government blaming migrants for their cost-of-living crisis, not to mention the resurgence of far-right extremism across Western Europe. Amidst this broader climate of anti-immigrant hostility, which contemporary migrant writers do you think are doing the most vital work in bearing witness? Moreover, what hurdles do you and your fellow publishers, translators, and editors come up against when trying to get these stories out to the mainstream?
Huapaya: We publish poetry, poetry in translation, and poetry translated from Spanish to English. It’s a small niche that we’re always trying to widen. The creation of new audiences takes time and resources. But with the scale of terror fracturing our communities and the funding cuts to small creative industries and cultural workers, the Trump administration is making all of this all the more precarious. Nevertheless, we continue collaborating to strengthen our community organisations and solidarity. We will continue to publish poetry that migrates, and they cannot snatch away our creativity or our joy.
Poetry written in Spanish in the United States has been documenting and responding to this constant horror. The list is long, but I’ll include a few names of contemporary poets with whom I also feel a poetic affinity: Omar Pimienta, Dolores Dorantes, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Román Luján, Hugo García Manríquez, Eliana Hernández, Carlos Soto Román, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, José Antonio Villarán, and Lau Cesarco, among many others.
(These interview responses were originally written in Spanish by Huapaya and were translated into English by Honora Spicer.)
