Welcome to Sala de Deseos
Sala de Deseos: A wishing room, a space to dream, a place where you are welcome.
Sala de Deseos: A space that holds stories by & about the Central American Diaspora
In 2021, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts awarded Leticia Hernández-Linares and ten other artists the YBCA 10 Fellowship.
YBCA asked them to explore intersections between creative practice and social change, lead institutional transformation through radical imagination, and commissioned them to create prototypes for inviting experiences, centered around art,
well being, and racial justice, that would eventually launch into community.
From January 2021 to May 2022, LHL designed and activated the Sala de Deseos (Wishing Room), an interdisciplinary, interactive installation that counters stereotypes about immigrants. This multi-platform conceptual project centers the Central American Diaspora and aims to occupy space on the page, stage, and in art institutions and classrooms. In its first stage, the Sala welcomed visitors into a living room to learn about and engage with the Diaspora. Speaking to the immigration crisis in the
United States, this prototype reframes stereotypes & negative narratives around immigrants and celebrates homeland.
Bienvenida
“Bienvenida,” the poem that anchors the Sala de Deseos was published in BOMB Magazine, Issue 160, Summer 2022. Visitors were able to read an excerpt of the poem in English on one of the Sala walls. LHL's creative translation of a few lines donned the YBCA marquee in downtown San Francisco in June, 2022.
The poem responds to Vice President Kamala Harris’s unwelcome message during a press conference
in Guatemala in June 2021. This project counters decades of misrepresentation and criminalization of
the Diaspora.
La Muñeca Sin Pena on Strike
La Muñeca Sin Pena (Anti-Worry Doll): The Sala is a stronghold for the Muñecas Sin Penas who are on strike. The Anti-Worry Dolls invite you to pick your worries up off their shoulders, empower you to set your own intentions and hold your own wishes.
After a tour around the Bay Area, La Muñeca Sin Pena now resides at San Francisco State University, on Ramaytush Ohlone unceded, ancestral land, and the birth place of the first college of Ethnic Studies.
Librería Libre Leyenda -The Library of Legends and Liberation
One of the project’s main components, the Librería is a special collection of Central American Diasporic Literature that counters long-standing misrepresentations and silences around the stories of Central American migrations.
The Librería is a budding library of work by and about the Central American Diaspora, and aims to take control of the narrative about who we are. Explore these titles so you can begin to understand us outside of the dominant narrative that frames us as violent and criminal. Read about who we are from our perspectives.
*Muralist, Fredericko Alvarado, was commissioned to paint the Librería cabinet and mural
Wishing Marimba Coffee Table
Wishing Marimba Coffee table represents Flor y Canto, the Nahuatl translation of poetry as flower songs, and the belief that poetry has an important role in community and storytelling.
Made of cocobolo, Central American hardwood, the marimba represents a deconstructed wishing tree. In the original installation, Sala visitors were invited to play it & create rhythms as a way to conjure their wishes through sound.
Throughout history, wishing trees have emerged around the world as evidence of communal practices of manifesting––a visioning process grounded in natural sources of power.
Originating in Africa, a word with roots in Bantu languages, this instrument underscores the legacy of slavery & African cultures in the history of the Américas. This instrument appears throughout history in Asia, Africa, as well as Central America.
Collective Wishing
Visitors to the Sala were invited to offer a wish.
~Take a corn husk & a few kernels of corn. Set an intention for the future, for you, for your community.
~Fold your husk & tie it with string & if you want to write on it, write vertically to avoid tearing husk.
~Leave your bundle in the baskets as an offering for collective community conjuring. Your corn husks will be hung along the side of the Sala de Deseos. The power of your intentions will be combined & sourced towards the communal good. At the end of the project, the bundles will be returned to the earth.
~You have the power & authority to write & live your own story. Reclaim it.
Community
Sala Pop-Ups and related poetry events and doll-making events continue to reach audiences, participants, and readers. Leticia Hernández-Linares (LHL) activates the Sala in a variety of ways to uplift, celebrate, and collaborate with Central American Diaspora artivists, writers, students, communities, and accomplices.
In 2022, LHL hosted over five intergenerational events at YBCA. In 2023-2024, she organized and hosted Sala Pop-Ups in four different venues in the Mission and across the bay and hosted seven poetry events. She also continues to contribute as a writer, translator, and editor.
Librería Libre Leyenda Resources
The Librería features books such as, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. This book represents the first comprehensive anthology featuring Central American Diaspora writers. Leticia Hernández-Linares co-edited this book and created an accompanying course, LTNS 565: Central Americans Writing in the US, that includes this title and the subsequent books published by it’s showcased authors. The Wandering Song literary guide and assignment curriculum was created to provide students a view into Central American experiences and analyze key themes throughout the book. To accompany the books in the Librería is information on collective libraries and their role as a tool of liberation.
.jpg)
Leticia Hernández Linares
Leticia Hernández-Linares is an award-winning bilingual, interdisciplinary writer, artist and racial justice educator. The first-generation U.S. born daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, she is the author of the poetry collection Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl and the children’s book Alejandria Fights Back! ¡La lucha de Alejandría! She has presented her poemsongs throughout the country and in El Salvador. She is an Assistant Professor in Latina, Latino Studies at San Francisco State University, and in 2023, she received the Community Appreciation Teyolía Award from the San Francisco Flor y Canto Poetry Festival. A daily witness to gentrification, and an eviction survivor, she has lived, created, taught, and protested in the Mission District (unceded, ancestral Ramaytush Ohlone land), while living on the same block, for thirty years.
Kathryn Constantino
Kathryn Constantino is a first-generation college student pursuing their Master’s in Ethnic Studies. She is from Rialto, a small town in Southern California. She is a second-generation Chicana that comes from an immigrant family with roots in Sinaloa, Jalisco, and Michoacán, Mexico. She devotes herself to her family, culture, and community. Recently, she has received a FURI grant at San Francisco State University alongside Professor Leticia Hernández Linares to research Central American Diaspora and Collective Libraries. Her future goals include returning to her hometown and educating communities of color in Ethnic Studies. She plans to develop a curriculum that focuses on gentrification, school-to-prison pipeline, racial capitalism, and emphasizes the impact of ethnic studies on students of color. She’d like to teach at the high school level and hopes to lead other Latinx youth into pursuing higher education and learn more about ethnic studies.