Alien Dreams and Immigrant Nightmares

Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares spans twenty-five years of José Torres-Tama’s verse in his unique bilingual voice. Labeled a “Permanent Resident Alien” when entering GringoLandia at age 7 in 1968, he explores the psychic, physical, and open wounds of an Ecuadorian immigrant balancing two languages and cultures—challenging the United States to realize its mythic ideals as the beacon of democracy. Inspired by writers like Ntozake Shange, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Martín Espada, his poems document migratory leaps from Guayaquil, Ecuador to New York City, where his family owned a coffee wagon business in Union Square, and Jersey City, where his teen-age rites of passage forged his urban warrior persona, to the Caribbean-influenced port city of New Orleans, his muse and adopted home since 1984. Praise for José Torres-Tama and Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares Like the speaker in one of his poems, José Torres-Tama may well have “arrived like an immigrant toy with a distant tongue.” And the poems gathered here are a testament to his ability to wield that tongue in two languages, to make it dance for his readers both on the page and in the Out-Loud of performance for which he is so well known. Compiled over many years, Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares is a book worth the wait. José Torres-Tama es un malabarista de palabras e imágenes, de mundos y realidades. Y estos poemas respiran el fuego. -Brenda Marie Osbey, author of History and Other Poems (Time Being Books, 2013), Distinguished Visiting Professor Department of Africana Studies, Brown University; Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2005-2007.