The Latino Factory


The semi-anonymity of the DJ, or maybe the librarian, is what I often admire. Lead us to the exact texts, those we might otherwise never find. The secret books.

Write with the sentence crumbling once it's posted. Work with the machine to "produce" the words, this factory living. Claudia has theorized the notion of the "Latino factory," an extension of Andy Warhol's warehouse aesthetics. How much of our lives do we lose to career repetition? How can we use that forced repetition for our own poems? The Latino factory is Jean-Michel Basquiat in his various studios, producing a huge body of work before his early (although expected) death. The Latino factory is writing itself to prove its visibility. No matter how ridiculous the situation (And they do get ridiculous. See, for instance, the episode in the paint factory in Ellison's The Invisible Man.), the Latino factory keeps producing. Perpetual movement is what aligns the Latino factory. The factory is always minimum-wage and overworked.

In an interview, the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris recounts the time he worked in a factory when he first moved to England in 1959. If you can imagine his future jungle-dense epic prose poems working long hours at a grim London factory during the middle of winter, that too is the Latino factory.