The GuatemaLAngelino Poet who Refused the Hyphen: Gustavo Adolfo Guerra Vásquez (1973–2026)

A Tribute

By: Oriel Siu

October 7, 2026

The hyphen is a small mark, barely a line between two words. To most of us, so thin a stroke that we pass over it without much notice.

But for Gustavo Adolfo Guerra Vásquez, the hyphen could carry the weight of empires. It could join two words while keeping two worlds apart. It could become a border, an immigration checkpoint, or a constant reminder of who is welcomed into a nation and who is forever asked to explain where they are really from.

“Nothing against the use of hyphens,” he wrote, “but my name does not have a hyphen.

“Because while a hyphen is sometimes used to join,

it can be flipped over as if to say:

GET BACK AND STAY BACK”                     

Born in Guatemala in 1973, Gustavo came to Los Angeles accompanied, as he put it, by “a coyota who specialized in bringing kids from Central América.” He was eight when he crossed what he later called the “hyphen on Mother Earth” to reunite with both his parents, becoming part of a generation of thousands of Central American children separated from their families by whom he also called, “U.S.-funded dictators,” and their wars.

He would spend the rest of his life writing from the place of that crossing; against the physical border itself, and against the borders embedded in the language used to describe those who crossed it.

“I am a GuatemaLAngelino… no hyphen,” he declared in his 2023 chapbook, GUATEMALANGELINO (Izote Press).

By then, Gustavo had created many other names, “GuanaMex,” “SouthCentralAmerican,” “Guanachapín,” “Chapicano,” “GuaNiCatraChapicano,” joining places, histories, languages, identities and peoples that nation-state categories have long insisted on keeping apart. For Gustavo, naming was always an act of making room. Just as language could reproduce borders, it could also break them open, creating space for us to write ourselves in.

From 1991 to 1995, while the U.S.-backed war in Guatemala was still being waged, Gustavo studied Latin American literatures at UCSC, earning Honors in the major but insistently challenging the idea that academic spaces held a monopoly on literary production. First as an undergraduate and later as a graduate student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, Gustavo organized numerous poetry gatherings and cultural events across various communities in California, including Noche de Artistas and Sabor a Chocolate, where Central American, Chicana, Chicano, and other Latinx writers, artists, and audiences encountered one another, shared histories and even workshopped story-telling, often for the first time.

From those gatherings emerged various collaborations, performances, and publications that eventually helped shape the emerging field of Central American Studies and broadened Latina/o literary Studies in the United States. Gustavo’s contributions during the 1990s and early 2000s helped build the spaces in which Central American literature could eventually exist.

The timing mattered. The 1990s were a decade in which the United States was deeply present in Central American lives in the form of bullets and bombs, military aid, provoked disappearances and displacement, yet Central America, and Central American voices, remained largely absent from the American imagination and its educational institutions. Central American literature was even more absent, and yet by the late 1990s, Los Angeles had become a major center of Central American life. We were working in LA homes and restaurants, riding and driving Metro buses, attending schools and universities, raising children not always our own, and filling neighborhoods all the way to the Valley with our languages and ways. The United States had helped shape the conditions that brought many of us north, yet we remained largely absent from the stories the United States told about itself in Central America, and about us in Los Angeles.

Gustavo helped change this. By 2000, Guerra Vásquez was among the original members and co-founders of EpiCentroAmerica, a Central American literary and artistic collective that emerged out of Los Angeles. The collective's first reading, Epicentroamerican@s, was named after a poem by Gustavo, who coined the term “Epicentroamericanos.” The name joined “Epicentro,” a point from which an eruption radiates outward, with “Centroamérica,” a region whose name itself carries histories of conquest, division, and imposed geographies.

The collective's primary printed record later became Desde el EpiCentro: An Anthology of U.S. Central American Poetry and Art, co-edited by poet-scholars Maya Chinchilla and Karina Oliva-Alvarado (2009). The work gave visibility and permanence to a nascent U.S. Central American literary world.

In the decades that followed, Gustavo’s work appeared in publications and anthologies including The Coiled Serpent, Fingir, Arte Latino Now and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, published by Tia Chucha’s Press in 2017. He wrote tirelessly, producing countless poems and performance pieces, working in visual art and community organizing, and offering writing workshops in high schools, colleges, and universities. Gustavo was a teacher, mentor, and connector of writing communities. Throughout it all, he returned to one fundamental question: What happens when we expose the hyphens in our daily lives and turn the language of power back against itself? Gustavo's poetry always knew how to answer this.

The Department of homeland insecurity

will be taking citizenship away

not for being unamerican

but for being too American and believing in equal rights,civil rights and liberty

or was it civil liberties and the right to equality? 

(GUATEMALANGELINO, 2023) 

With humor and wit, Gustavo wrote bilingually, in Spanish and English, in Spanglish, and, when the poem called for it, he even wrote across four languages, bringing his Maya learnings onto the page whenever he found a way:

I’m from enchiladas that look like tostadas

pero sin chile por favor

yes, please hold the chile

I’m from k’ak ik and chuchitos

to greasy Tommy Burgers on the corner of Rampart and Temple

our Temple. 

(GUATEMALANGELINO, 2023)

Gustavo’s poems wrote Los Angeles as a Central American city, and Central America into Los Angeles. In his verses, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Panama and Honduras converged in Pico-Union. Central America was there; in the booming apartment complexes “turned speakers” where too many lives were made to fit inside too little space. In MacArthur Park and Westlake; in Metro buses carrying children home from school while their parents were still at work; in televisions turned babysitters.

Central Americans were in the “Where you from”  LA question of “gangsteristas”, and in the “I’m from recitals of The Lord is my shepherd, on Sunset”; in the undocumented kitchens, too, where frijoles negros simmered after long workdays and foil-wrapped pupusas waited to be carried home for dinner somewhere in North Hollywood.

His poems showed Central America also in the South Central liquor stores, in the drinking that sometimes accompanied despair, and in the corners of Home Depots where “hombres” waited for work, “cornered” by an economy that needed their labor but had little place for their lives. In “Beautiful Butterflies,” he called these men’s condition a “cocoon of desperation / no longer a butterfly,” caught in the “disappointing morph in Disamerican Dream.”

Such was Gustavo’s particular gift: taking the mythic language of the American dream and turning it until the oppressions inside it became visible. War, borders, migration, displacement—he could take the vastness of political forces and bring them down to where they entered us: a body, a kitchen, a childhood memory, a father and son.

That is what made “Hombres who kiss men,” from The Wandering Song (2017), so important.

In the poem, Gustavo remembers walking hand in hand with his father after their arrival in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, greeting one another with the kisses and ordinary tenderness they had shared back home. Then, without warning, a stranger in a 4x4 truck, marked by an “Offroaders for Reagan” sticker, shouts a homophobic slur at them—“and I don’t mean the four-letter f word,” the poetic voice tells us. The insult wounds them deeply enough to “sever one of the few umbilical strings that still bound us to each other.”

Here, the border was no longer simply a line separating two nations. It had migrated into the intimate space between father and son. The same logic that polices who belongs on one side of a national border and who does not now polices the body: which forms of intimacy may appear in public, whose affection may be visible, whose bodies may touch, and whose tenderness must be contained. The political border becomes a gendered and homophobic border, reproducing itself within everyday life. Affection itself becomes something that must be surveilled, disciplined, and, in Gustavo’s image in that same poem, “locked up like immigrants without authorization.”

And this is where Gustavo’s image of the border as “a hyphen on Mother Earth” comes back to us. The hyphen is the border in miniature: a mark that joins even as it separates, connecting what it simultaneously insists must remain distinct. For Gustavo, the hyphen crosses borders with us. It enters our bodies, our languages, our families and words, regulating what could be said, shown, touched, or claimed as our own. It marks the space between identities, nations, genders, and desires, and, in doing so, determines what may be made visible and what must disappear in order to exist.

And so Gustavo spent his life undoing what the hyphen tried to make permanent. He took that little line meant to divide Mother Earth and turned it into a point of encounter, refusing the idea that Guatemala had to disappear for Los Angeles to become home, or that English had to silence Spanish, or that Central American identity had to fit neatly inside a nation-state category. He made names where none existed and grew literary spaces where none had lived before. He brought Maya knowledge into poems about South Central and put Central American writers into conversation with Chicana, Chicano, and Latinx writers and audiences.

Language is, too, a way of breaking the hyphen that divides us, making space for one another, gathering across borders and histories, recognizing one another in our complexity, and leaving something of ourselves in the world. Gustavo does precisely this in a poem addressed to a Chicano:

“our exchanges have transformed not only me

just one but both of us

so that by the time that we say goodbye in that handshake

you know, the one that looks like you’re starting or finishing some

sort of brown secret conspiracy meeting

they don’t realize that they have a piece of GuatemaLAn concrete

quetzales fluttering like hummingbirds inside their chest”

(GUATEMALANGELINO)

In all, Gustavo taught us that language, and the grammars of power, can be altered or entirely remade. Language is, after all, a place where we can, too, find belonging.

“Our words can be borders or bridges,” he would always say.

Reading his words now I cannot help but hearing them as a call to those of us who remain. I hear them as a call to keep making room, to keep naming or renaming what has been misnamed, and to keep breaking open the hyphens that insist one place, people, identity, language, story, or history must disappear for another to belong.

The hyphen was never just a line between worlds and words for Gustavo. It was always a place from which to speak so that no one ever felt the need to disappear.

Los Angeles has lost a poet. Central America has lost a poet. And Guatemala—GuatemaLA, as he insisted—has lost a poet and a wordsmith.

But perhaps no place can claim him now, because he belonged to all of us who found ourselves in his non hyphenated words and poems. And I can still hear him laughing, correcting the punctuation, reminding us that those little lines we draw between us are but marks on a page, and that we are always capable of writing and moving beyond them.

Thank you for the many lessons, dear friend, editor, teacher, maestro de la palabra, father, rider, writer, poet, @poetarista.

Your words remain.

Gustavo Adolfo Guerra Vásquez, 1973–2026.

No hyphen.

Oriel Siu, PhD, is a ChineseHonduran scholar and writer. Born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, she migrated to Los Angeles in 1997, where, as an undergraduate at California State University, Northridge, she helped establish the first Central American Studies Program in the nation. She earned a doctorate from UCLA and has taught Ethnic Studies and Latinx literatures at universities across the West Coast. Dr. Siu is also the author of the Rebeldita the Fearless children’s book series, which includes, Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It's Over! She now lives in Honduras.