One evening in late autumn of 2017, artist Veronica Melendez returned home from her shift at work and sketched out plans for an arts publication for Central Americans and by Central Americans. Melendez, a Washington, D.C. native of the Salvadoran diaspora, was living in a shared house with 10 other people at the time. She sat at her kitchen table and began to conceive of a zine focused on the artistic and literary production of Salvadorans. “The zine was born out of frustration,” Melendez told me, thinking back to that moment of genesis. Frustration with “the lack of representation of Central Americans in the printed arts world.”
Now an assistant professor of visual arts at Hampshire College, Melendez drew from her formal training as an artist and photographer—she holds a BFA and MFA—and her studies that explored her Salvadoran and Guatemalan family in D.C. The zine format was a natural choice for her emergent project: its cost-effective informality provided an ideal space for the kind of countercultural expression she envisioned, a DIY aesthetic that would cultivate Central American artistic agency and self-representation.
Thus, La Horchata was born, an arts publication that features the work of artists with Central American ancestry. It emerged against the backdrop of the first Trump administration, from the generative ground of D.C.’s Salvadoran diaspora community. Melendez partnered with her Bolivian-Salvadoran friend Kimberly Benavides, a fellow Corcoran arts school graduate, to develop the project. They assembled the first issue on a kitchen table and printed it on an old Xerox machine.
Melendez and Benavides initially envisioned a project that would provide Salvadorans and Central Americans in D.C. an imprint to share their stories and artwork. “Enough of other people—Trump, the media, the bullshit—telling everyone what Central Americans are like,” Melendez said. “We needed a platform where we could speak for ourselves.” Little did they know, La Horchata would become one of the de facto living archives of Central Americanness in diaspora, a publication and community space for sharing the varied facets of Central American lives and imaginations.
They named the project after a rice and cinnamon beverage popular across the isthmus. The name “is like a metaphor,” Melendez explained in an email. “It’s the land that binds us all together—the things we have in common because the drink is made of all these different recipes like all of us from Central America. We’re all different recipes, como toda la gente, because we are not a monolith!”
Creating an Arts Publication
As autumn wound down, Melendez and Benavides invited contacts from across D.C. to submit their artwork. This intimate network imbued the first issue with a diasporic spirit that would only consolidate as the project developed. Having grown up among other Central Americans—an uncommon experience for many Central Americans in the United States—Melendez wanted the zine to reflect the strength of her community but also the need for diasporic continuity.
“The first issue was just for our friends, for D.C.,” Melendez admitted. “We didn’t think people outside our circle would even care.” As they curated their friends’ artwork, shared motifs around nostalgia and memories of Central America emerged. Platformed on social media, the zine soon attracted a network that would champion its Central Americanness, subtending queer inclusivity, relationality, and historical memory of the isthmus in particular.
From its inception, the zine was rooted in a practice of queer collectivity that cohered to what scholar Ana Patricia Rodriguez calls the “trans-isthmus,” a way of “reading Central American literatures and cultures outside of categories that up to now have elided larger regional complexities.” Rejecting the stereotypification often imposed on Central Americans, Melendez and Benavides sought to challenge what Latinx scholar Claudia Milian describes as “Central American abject humanity”—the reduction of Central Americans to signifiers of poverty.
In inviting complexity, Melendez and Benavides avoid placing limits on how Central American artists tell their stories. “The only requirement is that you have some sort of Central American ancestry. That’s it,” said Melendez, which functions on “an honor-based system.” This openness, however, comes with a clear editorial vision. The creators resist motifs common to post-war literary and artistic expression on Central America, and they deliberately reject diaspora clichés—no “mi abuela made tortillas by the fire” unless it’s doing something new,” Benavides said.
Similarly, there are no issues explicitly about the genocide in Guatemala, or political and religious exile from Nicaragua. “We don’t set themes. We don’t ask for migration stories. We let people tell whatever story they want,” Meléndez explained. This approach reflects what adrienne maree brown calls “pleasure activism,” a move towards indexing Central Americanness on the basis of joy and inclusivity. The goal is not to reproduce nostalgia for its own sake or package Central American trauma for consumption, but rather to make room for novel, complex interpretations of Central American identities and histories, carving out space where curation creates novel archives of living memory.
A Central American Counter Public
While eliding thematic categorization, the creators emphasize that the zine is inherently political. “We are not neutral,” said Benavides. “We are pro-Palestine, anti-Trump, anti-Bukele, anti-Biden. The zine shares our values.” This spirit reflects the political awareness of the Salvadoran and Guatemalan diaspora in the D.C-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) region, a place where Central American resistance has been seen at least since the 1991 Mt. Pleasant uprising, when riots broke out against the police shooting of a Salvadoran man following a Cinco de Mayo celebration.
This praxis also reflects the emerging political vernacular of U.S. Central American literature and art. La Horchata was launched the same year that Javier Zamora published his poetry debut Unaccompanied, which would be followed by his best-selling memoir Solito. 2017 was also the year that the pathbreaking anthology The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, co-edited by Leticia Hernandez-Linares and Rubén Martínez, was published. Like these initiatives, La Horchata offered a new and needed space for Central Americans—a counter public from which to tell their own stories, a living archive where nostalgia and remembrance intersected with personal stories, poetic historiography, and multi-media art.
The zine clearly hit a nerve. At the second annual D.C. Art Book Fair, held on November 5, 2017 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Melendez and Benavides sold all 15 copies of the first issue of La Horchata in a single day. “That’s when it became real,” Melendez said. Instagram comments at the time deeply celebrated their achievement.
For the second issue, the creators opened up submissions on Instagram. “Suddenly, we had over a hundred entries, said Melendez. “It became bigger than just D.C.” As the reality set in, the editorial vision for the zine soon expanded beyond the Northern Triangle’s diaspora.
Reflecting the conviviality suggested by the zine’s title—as a shared social space for Central Americans—subsequent issues began to expand its purview by cultivating more deliberate attention to diversity and inclusivity. This expansion particularly emphasized a Central Americanness rooted in queer countercultures. “Queerness is central to La Horchata,” Melendez affirmed. “Every open call brings in more queer artists.” It is a queerness aligned with José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of queer thought as a space where “arduous modes of relationality persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies of being.”
The zine’s print-only format enhances the beauty and ephemerality of the reading experience as queer maneuver, one that attests to diasporic mobilities. “There’s something deeply immigrant about holding onto objects when you move,” Melendez explained. “Maybe that’s why we’re so committed to print.” This material choice reflects the spirit at the heart of La Horchata. As Melendez put it, “It’s a community process, not just a publication,” a process that unfolds through exchanges among writers, scholars, and activists from all over the world, transforming each issue into a queer conversational collage.
While the zine’s curation reflects a particular ethos of emerging U.S. Central American literature and art, its visual palette clearly evokes the colors color schemes, motifs, and textures of Central America. A kitchen cutting board from a grandparent’s home, for example, conjures childhood days in the isthmus. Plastic bags of drinks bought at a corner tienda and sipped through a plastic straw stir a trademark nostalgia that is rerouted through the zone’s queer symbolic framework. As the reader turns its pages, that interplay between past and present is further channeled through QR codes, Instagram links, etchings, poems, and multi-media pieces. The archive becomes a repertoire, engaging the reader in a kind of interactive performance.
Growing Together by Coming Together
By the end of 2017, only a month after the D.C. Book Art Fair, La Horchata had been featured by the premiere Latina/o culture publication Remezcla. Two years later, Melendez and Benavides appeared in the Washington Post. Today, La Horchata is being acquired by the MoMA and is archived at the Smithsonian. Yet, more important than institutional prestige is the spirit of the zine as a tableau of Central American diaspora that is taking the reins on its representation by coming together. As Melendez noted, “Every time we do an open call, there’s new people reflecting how the original idea was to find each other,” describing a journey of mutual discovery embedded in the zine’s genesis.
Today, La Horchata’s platform mirrors the growth of other Central American cultural spaces in the United States, from Instagram collectives like @CentralAmericanCollective and @CentAmBeauty to global celebrations in response to Afro-Costa Rican paralympic athlete Sherman Guity’s Gold Medal win. This new visibility is remarkable—Central American diasporic spaces are increasingly defined not by rigid orthodoxies but by heterodoxic practices and cultures as varied as the diaspora itself. There is no single “Central American narrative,” and La Horchata’s pages reflect that, challenging the erasures of Blackness, Indigeneity, and queerness from Latina/o signifiers.
In Issue #10, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill assistant professor Martin Wannam shares a piece that fuses Mesoamerican iconography with contemporary objects and color schemes. In Xochiquetzal, Wannam places the eponymous goddess onto a smartphone holder, superimposing this juxtaposition onto an iridescent jungle. The image resists the mnemonics of a mere archeological metaphor, offering a layered composition where ancient symbolism meets the present.
“I’m interested in bringing to the forefront goddesses that uplift or are in conversation to cuirness in relation to the Mesoamerican civilization,” Wannam explained via email. “The image is a still life that represents an altar to her. To remember her. To pray to a cuir goddess.”
Wannam’s piece also appeared in Houston’s Art League Gallery in early 2025, reflecting how the zine has become a place for tracing the evolution of U.S. Central American literature and art, further underscoring the centrality of queerness and Indigenous presence in this emerging aesthetic terrain.
Wannam’s praxis of juxtaposition and resignification reflects the leftist politics of détournement, a practice that “detours” capitalist imagery to undermine its narratives. Developed in 1952 by the Letterist International, formed by Gil Wolman and Guy Debord, this tradition has influenced La Horchata since its earliest issues. In her early contributions, for example, Melendez erases branding from iconic Latine and Central American companies like Pollo Campero, highlighting consumer culture as an appendage of social memory.
Wannam and Melendez’s engagements with the past—whether associated through Mesoamerican symbolism or a contemporary capitalist imagery—find resonance in Jessy DeSantis’ closing piece from the most recent issue, “Return to the Land.” In this work, DeSantis describes herself as curled in “a fetal position buried in a pre-Colombian urn shaped as a womb.” Unearthed in Managua, Nicaragua, these ancient urns held the dead in their return to the land that bore them. “I’ve also reconnected to my truth,” she writes, “that we come from the land, we are the land, and we are incredibly disconnected from it. Meaning we are disconnected from ourselves.” Her reflection captures a theme that runs through La Horchata: the healing of relational and historical trauma through art and memory, the recovery of pain and idyll, and the juxtaposition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures as a way to measure violence in the isthmus and excavate the silences produced by colonial erasure.
At another scale, DeSantis’ piece reflects her longstanding contributions to the zine. Over time, she has helped shape La Horchata’s queer collective ethos, embracing heterodox approaches to memory, aesthetics, and political reckoning.
Central American Spaces of Solidarity
The importance of creating and holding space for Central American artistic voices contrasts with the serial dispossession experienced by Black and Indigenous Central Americans. The zine’s culture of inclusivity and curatorial heterodoxy intervenes at the places where memory and collectivity would otherwise be erased or harmed, an intervention that measures how far Central American artists and writers have come and can go.
At its core is a spirit of acompañamiento, a practice of walking and moving together in a political commons. This is evident in the founders’ own engagements with artistic and social questions surrounding queerness and what it means to be Central American. If La Horchata has a defining feature, it is this spirit of collective becoming that reshapes the regionalist categorization of Central Americans into a methodological orientation that emanates beyond its borders. As Melendez notes of the response she has seen across multiple issues, “People messaged us saying they lived in places with no other Central Americans. La Horchata was their only connection.”
At the Chicago Art Book Fair in 2018, a young queer Salvadoran approached Melendez and Benavides with a bottle of Cola Champagne. She told them she had never felt so seen and had collected every issue, even though she had not yet contributed.
What began as a search for community became an artistic and academic endeavor, one that has helped redefine Centroamericanidad in the United States as a practice of inclusivity and connection that grows not in spite of any putative regional difference but because of it. It is a place of agency where heterodoxical practices reinforce the idea that to be Central American is as varied as the pages in the zine.
“There’s something special about finding each other in diaspora,” Melendez said. “We didn’t realize how much we needed it until we started this.”
John Kennedy Godoy is assistant professor of languages and literatures and the University of Colorado, Boulder. Their work is published or forthcoming in Diacritics, Aztlán, Latin American Literary Review, Latin American Cultural Studies, and others. He is currently researching unaccompanied childhood migration narratives from Central American and Mexico to the United States.