Reina Davis’ beautiful and bittersweet poem, Cuidado, contemplates the dual themes of grief and care, love and loss, in two languages and through two relationships. It highlights the multilingual and intergenerational nature of Davis’s lived experience. 

As the daughter of Spanish-speaking immigrants myself, Davis’s inclusion of that complicated bilingual aspect of her life (I have learned / enough Spanish / to embellish my tongue) really resonated with me. Encountering little bits of Spanish in the poem felt very true to the way I use Spanish with my family and the ones I love. 

I enjoyed hearing from Reina about the ways creativity has helped her explore her feelings and identity, how the privacy of her coded journal entries evolved into spoken word poetry, and her hopes for helping people connect to each other and their own experiences.

What is your personal background–what is your story?

My name is Reina Davis and I am a mixed-race Chicana originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I grew up in a multi-generational and cultural household, which I think was a really incredible and beautiful thing. With that, did come the struggles of finding where I felt I belonged, of a complicated relationship with Spanish, my grandfather’s first language, and working through and recognizing generational trauma. I graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2019 with a bachelors in both Gender Studies and Chicanx Studies...

Read more about Reina Davis and her poem, Ciudado, in I, Enheduanna Issue 3: In Our Hands, available here.