Wonderland: Crónicas of Belonging in America
Melanie Márquez Adams
Translated by Emily Hunsberger
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Melanie Márquez Adams’s Wonderland: Crónicas of Belonging in América, translated by Emily Hunsberger, is a luminous act of reclamation—one that rejects the market’s hunger for predictable narratives of suffering and instead insists on a textured, plural, and defiant account of immigrant belonging. These crónicas are neither memoir nor manifesto, but rather something more elastic and unruly: intimate dispatches from in-between geographies, penned in Spanish as resistance and translated into English without dilution.
From the opening piece, “Wonderland,” Márquez Adams makes clear she will not conform to the borders of expectation. She refuses to offer the familiar arc of immigrant pain. Instead, she stakes her voice on dislocation that is subtle, privileged, often joyous—and no less worthy of literature. Her language oscillates between irony and tenderness, never settling. “Are you or are you not a writer of color?” the narrator is asked. The question becomes a haunting refrain—not because the author doesn’t know the answer, but because the culture asking it refuses to see multiplicity as valid. Throughout the collection, Márquez Adams’s prose walks a deliberate line between nostalgia and critical distance. In “Campus Selfie” and “The Color of Lakes,” she renders East Tennessee as both a landscape and a mythology—where leafless trees reflect the body in quiet transformation, and where the politics of race and language seep into everyday exchange. The whiteness of place and perception becomes a silent, recurring character. Yet her writing resists flattening. She does not parody the South or romanticize it; she documents its contradictions with lyrical clarity. What makes Wonderland remarkable is not its thematic novelty, but its refusal to perform pain in familiar registers. The collection asserts that bilingualism is not merely linguistic but existential. Writing in Spanish becomes a form of sovereignty; the English translation, handled with both reverence and audacity by Hunsberger, preserves the original’s tonal complexity while making visible the uneasy transaction of literary migration. |
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In one of the most moving pieces, “The Ghost of the South,” Márquez Adams reimagines the Ecuadorian legend of the Dama Tapada as a spectral immigrant in Nashville. The ghost, denied her veil and license to haunt, becomes a flâneuse of country music bars—a metaphor not just for assimilation but for what remains untranslated, unseen. Like much of the book, it’s haunting, playful, and slyly political.
Wonderland does not offer resolution. It accumulates, it lingers, it invites the reader to stand in uncertainty. In this way, Márquez Adams reframes belonging—not as a destination, but as a collection of precisely observed contradictions. It is in those contradictions that her crónicas live and breathe, inviting us not to decide where she fits, but to listen to how she moves.
Melanie Márquez Adams is the author of Anfibias (Mouthfeel, 2024), Querencia: crónicas de una latinoamericana en USA (Katakana, 2020), El país de las maravillas: crónicas de mi sueño americano (César Chávez Institute, 2021), and Mariposas negras (Eskeletra, 2017). She holds an MFA in Spanish Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, and in 2022 her work was selected as a finalist for the Paz Prize, awarded by The National Poetry Series. In 2024, she was awarded the Mary Corylé Prize by Ecuador’s Universidad Nacional de Educación for her fiction manuscript Señorita Lázaro. Melanie continues to explore the intersections of identity, migration, and language, establishing herself as a vital voice in contemporary Latin American and U. S. Latinx literature.
Emily Hunsberger translates literature written in Spanish by authors from all across the Americas, including the United States. Her translation of Wonderland: Crónicas of Belonging in América, a collection of essays by Melanie Márquez Adams, was recently published by Mouthfeel Press. Her translations of shorter works have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, The Southern Review, PRISM international, The Common, Southwest Review, and forthcoming in Grist. She lives with her family in Philadelphia.
Wonderland does not offer resolution. It accumulates, it lingers, it invites the reader to stand in uncertainty. In this way, Márquez Adams reframes belonging—not as a destination, but as a collection of precisely observed contradictions. It is in those contradictions that her crónicas live and breathe, inviting us not to decide where she fits, but to listen to how she moves.
Melanie Márquez Adams is the author of Anfibias (Mouthfeel, 2024), Querencia: crónicas de una latinoamericana en USA (Katakana, 2020), El país de las maravillas: crónicas de mi sueño americano (César Chávez Institute, 2021), and Mariposas negras (Eskeletra, 2017). She holds an MFA in Spanish Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, and in 2022 her work was selected as a finalist for the Paz Prize, awarded by The National Poetry Series. In 2024, she was awarded the Mary Corylé Prize by Ecuador’s Universidad Nacional de Educación for her fiction manuscript Señorita Lázaro. Melanie continues to explore the intersections of identity, migration, and language, establishing herself as a vital voice in contemporary Latin American and U. S. Latinx literature.
Emily Hunsberger translates literature written in Spanish by authors from all across the Americas, including the United States. Her translation of Wonderland: Crónicas of Belonging in América, a collection of essays by Melanie Márquez Adams, was recently published by Mouthfeel Press. Her translations of shorter works have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, The Southern Review, PRISM international, The Common, Southwest Review, and forthcoming in Grist. She lives with her family in Philadelphia.
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