Stolen Flower

From a trailblazing poet, a trilingual narrative in verse that bears witness to a devastating crime and testifies to the power of collective defiance.

In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked on her farm. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, including eyewitness accounts, the courts ruled that Ascencio had died of natural causes. When journalists began to investigate, they discovered that there were numerous girls in the community who also had been raped by soldiers—girls as young as twelve who were already mothers. The reports sparked outrage throughout Latin America over violence against women and girls, violence against Indigenous communities, and military impunity.

Stolen Flower, a contemporary classic originally written in Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec), is Irma Pineda's powerful sequence of poems memorialising the events and their ramifications. The poems, which appear here in Didxazá, Spanish, and English, are told through a chorus of fictionalised voices: of Ascencio herself, of the field where the rape occurred, of the forest that has seen generations of Indigenous villagers, of the village grappling with the terror. It is at once a lament and a call to arms, refashioning the testimonio into a tribute to Mexico's Indigenous peoples and their lands, cultures, languages, and dignity.