Petra Salazar discusses brutal honesty, querencia, resistance to colonial borders and binaries, her forthcoming collection, Harsh Terrain, and more with editorial assistant Kyle Mayl. Petra’s poems “Chupacabra” and “Our People” were featured in the Fall/Winter 2023 issue of Colorado Review.
Petra Salazar is a poet and educator from Northern New Mexico, where her work is rooted in the land-based traditions, resilience, and complexities of Indohispano culture. Her debut poetry collection, Harsh Terrain, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press in 2025. Petra’s writing explores the intersections of body, place, and inheritance in a landscape shaped by nuclear colonization. A finalist and honorable mention in the 2022 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is currently developing Coyote Pedagogy, a book project exploring land-based, justice-oriented approaches to teaching and learning.
Kyle Mayl: In one of your poems featured in the Colorado Review, “Our People,” the speaker names “El Indio y La Gringa” and refers to their heritage as a “Mezcla de sangre, colonizador y colonizada.” The poem moves between English and Spanish and blurs the boundaries between political and personal. Lines like these make me curious how Coyote identity and the idea of the borderlands influence your work.
Petra Salazar: My work is intimate and vulnerable, and that can make some readers uncomfortable, especially when it crosses the imaginary colonial boundaries meant to divide the personal from the political—this side of the barbed wire fence from that side. But coyotes are natural border crossers, wandering those liminal spaces.
For people who are caught up in the colonized mindsets of the US, the binaries and blood quantum are really important. There’s pressure for me to identify as white. There’s pressure for me to identify as Hispanic. In some ways, my identity—who I am, my existence—is a “fuck you” to those colonial binaries. The simple fact that I exist really challenges people on what they think race means and on their experience of race. If I were to speak in my own terms and not US binary terms, I would call myself a “Coyote.” Growing up in the castas of northern New Mexico, “Coyote” is what people called me and people like me.
The term “Coyote” originally referred to the offspring of Spaniards and Indigenous people. As Anglo people entered the region, the term evolved to describe those who were part-Indohispano, part-Anglo. So, if you’re a Coyote, you have a mestizo parent and a white parent. I write from this idiosyncratic experience because I won’t pretend to be something I’m not. I’m not Native American. I’m not Mexican. I’m not white. I have an Anglo mother, an Indohispano father, and half-siblings who are tribal members through their fathers’ sides. When I talk about my identity, I use the racial categories I grew up with, not standard US classifications. I’m a Coyote from Northern New Mexico, and that means something.
In Latinx philosophy, “Coyote” can extend even further, describing detribalized mixed-race people across the Americas and maybe even beyond. I feel like it’s a term we can embrace because coyotes are awesome. Symbolically, they’re wily, they’re adaptable. They’re border crossers, tricksters, world travelers. They constantly flout colonial boundaries, whether those are physical borders or racial binaries. The Coyote identity performs the role that Gloria Anzaldúa calls “the New Mestiza.” We’re a bridge between cultures. We have access to go between cultures but not fully exist in or fully belong to them. I keep my eye on our post-secular, post-colonial future, when necessity will force us toward a more pluralistic understanding of identity and belonging. Coyote thinking can help us bridge past and future.
KM: I see that crossing of borders in your poems, especially when they blend images of the human body with desert landscapes that contain radioactive elements. How do you understand the relationship between those realms, and how do you navigate that relationship via form?
PS: The US government wastelanded vast stretches of the Southwest to build the Nuclear Corridor. Since 1943, nuclear weapons development has been a way of life. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, or “The Labs,” as we call them, is one of the largest employers of New Mexico. This is atomic violence—apocalyptic, ongoing—against the land-bodies that seek healing and reckoning.
When I write “the bomb / is in our blood,” I mean it literally and emotionally. The Southwest is radioactive. So is our inheritance. This is a place that is constantly on fire. The Cerro Grande Fire of 2000 ran right up against the labs. I feel like a ticking time bomb. They buried radioactive equipment in the desert for decades. Growing up, my well water had toxic levels of uranium. What they put in the land, they put in our bodies. I am an extraterrestrial byproduct of this radioactivity. I’ve struggled with my health my whole life.
Curanderismo and mindfulness are the land-body practices that ground my work. Place and body are not separate—I am the landscape viewing itself, in relationship with itself. This may be a quirk of Indophispano New Mexicans, who are animistic, bonded to place as heritage, and highly verbal about it. We even have a word for this bond: querencia. It’s our spiritual connection to land, ancestry, and heritage. It feels like a maternal presence. Motherland. It’s the motherland connection. It’s a style of being, a way of life. When I’m away from home too long, I get sick. Susto.
I’ve always been self-conscious about body differences. Most of my siblings grew up on the reservation in South Dakota or North Dakota. They’re tribal members. We had different fathers. My father had Spanish blood. My brothers and sisters had Sioux Lakota blood. My mother had Anglo blood. The stakes involved in terms of identities were very visceral. One of my brothers would grumble about my dad having Spanish blood and would often school me on the violence of the conquistadores. I was constantly educated on race in my own home by my own siblings. We ranged in skin tones from very brown to me, the whitest in the family.
It was and is very important for me to avoid appropriating my siblings’ experiences.
As a white-skinned coyote, I’m mindful of my access—the doors that open for me but close in the faces of my brown-skinned family members. I use that privilege with intention, carrying messages from home: the urgency of addressing nuclear colonization, the resilience of traditional knowledge, and the ongoing struggle against erasure.
I think my approach is to be very truthful, no matter how embarrassing it is to not belong or to have longing. I am brutally honest about the lived experience of controversies within the body and within the culture. Being white in a Brown town is a bit embarrassing. When your family has brown skin, you become self-conscious of fitting in or not fitting in. I’m neurodiverse in this way of needing to be honest about the particularities of my identity. I never want to pretend to be anyone I’m not.
KM: I appreciate your emphasis on being brutally honest and not pretending. Working on my own poetry, I feel like it’s easy to experience imposter syndrome. It’s easy to feel like I need to present a certain profile in order to be seen by the world. What are your thoughts on what it means to be a poet and what it means to make art?
PS: My hometown—Española, New Mexico—is a sacred place with a sacred identity of resistance and scrappiness. We are scrappy people. Growing up, whenever I left Española, the sense of outside elitism was constant. As soon as I went to Santa Fe or Albuquerque, there were all these stereotypes about gangs and what it meant to be from the lowrider capital of the world. The stigma, the derogatory statements, the disparaging humor that kids from Española experienced—it made us sensitive to and wary of elitist attitudes. We wanted dignity in our lives.
So it’s been important for me to challenge ideas about being an artist that are white supremacist or that are “linguistic terrorism,” as Gloria Anzaldúa calls it. “Poetry is not a luxury,” as Audre Lorde puts it. That’s the reality I grew up with. I was writing to survive. Art is survival. It’s also a human instinct all throughout history. No academic or elitist art circle can police what art is or when art is happening.
I grew up between Taos and Santa Fe. They were colonized by a lot of artsy hippies. To be fair, they had some positive influence on my outlook. I love me some barefoot hippies. But that colonization also brought with it the art gallery culture. Why does Georgia O’Keeffe represent art in New Mexico? Why does Tony Hillerman represent writing in New Mexico? There’s something deeply wrong about that. That erasure and the fact that New Mexicans don’t get to represent New Mexico—those are slaps in the face.
When it comes to my art, I want to be adaptable. I want to be resilient. I want to speak to my audience. I want to know who my audience is and cater the conversation to them. For a long time, I rebelled against the industry and hoarded my poems for myself. I used them for healing, processing, and digestion of my experiences. Then I started sharing and publishing them. I started getting professional with the process. That helped me understand how foolish it is to submit to publications that don’t care about the things I care about.
KM: On that note, as you’re talking about publishers and finding your audience, I wanted to talk about your book, Harsh Terrain, forthcoming through FlowerSong Press this year. Congratulations! How would you frame this project? How would you describe the creation process?
PS: Yeah, thank you! I feel like I’m far from it now. Harsh Terrain is not my first, second, or third book. It’s my fourth book, but it’s my only book to have a publisher, and I’m very grateful for that. I think it’s my strongest and most “mature” work so far.
Harsh Terrain is a reckoning with inheritance—a complex and difficult querencia. It explores memory, history, and survival in the high desert. Most, if not all of the poems were written in the wake of my father’s death in 2016. The creation process was a form of grieving, a way of metabolizing the loss of someone who shaped both my life and my imagination. My dad was this theater visionary of the 1960s Chicano Renaissance in Northern New Mexico. He was born in 1925. When I was born, he was fifty nine years old. I feel close to history because of that. My grandparents were born in the 1800s. They were farmers and bootleggers who sold whiskey to Oppenheimer. My childhood stories from my father were from this interesting period of New Mexican history.
So, Harsh Terrain is a book about querencia. About heritage. Longing. Survival. Belonging. Not belonging. Resistance to colonial paradigms. It’s about how the identity that the colonizer is trying to push on me is so far from my lived experience. I carry Spanish, Anglo, and Indigenous traits and traditions. I’m interested in the way that my body is a culmination of experiences from different ancestors, from different races and backgrounds. I meditate on and continuously orbit these themes.
What is my responsibility to these voices that occupy such a big part of my imagination? How do I honor what they’ve given me? How do I honor their experiences, their suffering, their loss of ways of life, their dreams, their hopes? How do I embody that? How do I hold this complex legacy with dignity under the pressures of US stereotypes, assumptions, and projections? How do I convey both the weight of colonial violence and the miracles of traditional knowledge—of healing, resilience, and survival? I try to do it as I was taught: with a balance of humility and pride, in the classic Penitente tradition of the Manito people and the low ‘n’ slow rhythm of Chicano culture.
KM: As you’ve come to think about these questions, what texts, broadly constructed (music, painting, poetry, stories, etc.) have been foundational? What have you recently encountered that’s been formative?
PS: I’m very interested in people and process over products, so I’ve enjoyed not just reading texts but understanding the lives of my favorite artists and authors.
Tupac was my major childhood influence all the way until I went to college and encountered Frida Kahlo. And then I obsessed over Frida for a long time. And then I obsessed over Ernest Hemingway and Walt Whitman and the Beat Poets and Charles Bukowski. I think the common thread between them is their brutal honesty. It was such a relief to see these tough people with tender hearts talking about brutal truths and intimate vulnerabilities. It gave me a sense of permission to work in the realms that I found.
Gloria Anzaldúa was huge for me in college and continues to be huge for me. I’ve heard of people cancelling Gloria Anzaldúa, but, sorry, you can’t cancel Gloria Anzaldúa. Tomás Atencio is also an important writer to me. He was one of the authors of Resolana. He was a Northern New Mexican educator and social worker. He was operating in the mid-20th century. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony changed my life. Also, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks.
Recently, I finished The Power by Naomi Alderman. I started a sci-fi book club to help exercise my ability to imagine other possible futures. That’s been helpful, especially during our current sociopolitical reality. I recently watched Emilia Perez and One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix. Also, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s newest album, GNX. And I’m finally doing the work with The Artist’s Way. Have you heard of that?
KM: I have heard of it, but I haven’t read it!
PS: It’s like a twelve-step recovery program, but it’s for artists. It’s by Julia Cameron. I think it helps people reclaim and maintain the creative part of themselves. There are a lot of obstacles to maintaining that. Shit happens, people get sick, life events derail us from our creative life. The Artist’s Way has been very helpful for me.
KM: Seems practical and realistic—the poet as human being rather than idealized image.
PS: Right. Someone used this term recently to describe my boss, who was a photojournalist. They said, “she’s such a high-functioning artist.” That’s what I want to be: a high-functioning artist.
KM: That makes me think of your expansive background. You have an MFA in poetry and an ME in English and ESL. You have certifications in gardening, nonprofit management, and diesel mechanics. You served as the managing editor for Snapdragon Journal and you currently run Philopoetics, an organization that teaches adults. How do your diverse experiences inform your poetic practice?
PS: At my core, I’m a poet and an educator, but I express those identities across many domains. It’s part of the Coyote way of being, which is what I call “Coyote Pedagogy.” My latest book project has the same name. I want to know how to do my taxes, fix my car, and write a poem. I aim to bring the same care, curiosity, and artfulness to every world I enter.
As a child, I was fascinated by da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. He reflected a kind of plurality I recognized in myself. It’s the whole Whitman “I contain multitudes” idea.
I love how my varied pursuits keep me engaged with a beginner’s mind, forcing me to be an active citizen rather than an isolated ideator. I prefer real-world conversations over abstraction, learning from people doing real work in real communities. I align my efforts with what sustains me: family, land-body practices, art, and education. All these experiences are in dialogue with the books I read. Together, they shape my poetry.
KM: Last question. Why do you write? How has your practice changed over the years?
PS: There’s a long tradition of the healing arts in Northern New Mexico. I got into herbalism young and was really influenced by that kind of healer’s attitude toward life. The curanderismo way of life. I write to survive, to process, to heal. Poetry is alchemy, a kind of quantum leaping that helps me shift my mindset and expand my consciousness. One day, I’m totally messed up about something—haunted, triggered by trauma, having a panic attack. And then I write a poem. I receive the medicine and experience this paradigm shift that makes me more resilient. I’m able to move on in a way that I couldn’t before. Poetry helps me digest my experiences and make meaning.
Early on, my writing life was all wildfires. I wanted to be a Beat, a Bukowski hitchhiking through Europe, dead-eyeing reality. I had the Kerouac mindset: “The only people for me are the mad ones…” Then I got sober, went to graduate school, and started a family. Now, I want to keep my writing grounded because I aspire to be what a curandera friend calls an “OG Cycle Breaker.” The muses will ravage you if you let them, if you don’t corral them with sustainable land-body practices.
I also learned not to be precious about my process. I used to need a certain kind of pen, a certain kind of paper. Now, I write with what’s at hand. Maybe it’s my phone and I’m texting myself. Maybe I’m using scraps of paper that are completely disorganized and thrown on my floor. It’s all stream-of-consciousness writing that keeps me connected to my intuition and guides me toward the real work. When an idea congeals, I sit at my computer and treat it like a job, keeping in mind my commitments and my true audience. When I think of my audience, I picture myself back at the kitchen table or rocking on the swing bench under the portal with my father, talking about family stories, philosophy, and art. I think about being engaged in resolana, a rich cultural and intellectual tradition of Northern New Mexico. Resolana is both a physical and metaphorical space, a place of communal reflection, dialogue, and shared wisdom.
As an artist, I have a responsibility to steward my creative energy so my messages don’t get lost in the flames of self-destruction. I used to put myself in unsafe situations. Now, I just want to treat my body like a cherry lowrider: keep it tuned up. Life is hard. There is no rescue. The reality of our situation is that we don’t get universal basic income. If you’re not meeting your basic needs, you can’t be responsible even to the muse that you want to serve. I want to be a secure attachment figure for my child—not a wild-eyed creative that burns out. These days, my favorite compliments are competent, reliable, and high-functioning artist. My father’s Depression-era discipline, the military, and my Penitente culture gave me a solid foundation for soldiering up for my craft.
Kyle Mayl is a first-year MFA candidate in poetry at Colorado State University. His writing explores bilingual play, haunting memories, and the personal-political intersection.