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In Silent Tenants, Alberto Roblest Gives Voice to D.C’s Working Class Latinx Community

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This interview with Alberto Roblest was conducted in Spanish and translated into English by the writer. This story is also published in Spanish. Read it here.

If Alberto Roblest knows that there is a Metro commute in his future, he comes prepared. That usually means tucking a small notebook into his pocket, though sometimes he’ll bring an electronic tablet. As his train takes off, he begins to write.

Metro rides are fertile ground for Roblest, a poet from Mexico City who has called the D.C. area home for 16 years. Commuters become characters in his poems, which paint a vivid portrait of modern, working-class life. “I’m not an esoteric poet,” Roblest tells City Paper. “I’m preoccupied with reality.” 

It was on the Metro that Roblest wrote a number of the poems featured in his forthcoming collection, Inquilinos Mudos, or Silent Tenants, which local publisher Day Eight publishes on May 15. Featuring 19 poems, Silent Tenants is a lucid meditation on language, memory, heritage, and the inner lives of Washington’s Latinx community.

That community includes the people that live with Roblest in a rent-controlled apartment building in Columbia Heights. “I like exchanging ideas with my neighbors, and that’s how the idea for this book was born,” he says. “It’s a book based, above all, on their story, on my story, and the story of the Latinos that live here.”

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En Inquilinos mudos, el poeta Alberto Roblest le da lenguaje a los trabajadores latinxs