Issue 2 - June 2026

Florentino Solano writes in a regional variant of Tu’un Savi, the language of the Ñuu Savi or “Rain People,” commonly known in English as the Mixtec. Tu’un Savi is spoken by approximately 530,000 people in the Mexican states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Puebla, as well as thousands who, like Florentino, have left their homeland in search of economic opportunity.

In 2021, Florentino won two of the world’s most prestigious prizes for Indigenous-language writing: the Nezahualcóyotl Prize for Literature in Mexican Languages for the poetry collection Tákúu ndi’i tachi si’í yu / Todas las voces de mi madre and the Indigenous Literatures of the Americas Prize for the nonfiction work Yaa táxá’á kàà tùxìi / La danza de las balas. The latter was published in bilingual Tu’un Savi / Spanish edition by Mexico’s National Indigenous Languages Institute in 2022, and since then, I have translated it to English as Bullet Dance.

Bullet Dance belongs to the distinctly Latin American prose genre known as crónica, or “chronicle,” which blends the stylistic resources of literary fiction with the confessional sincerity and self-implication of investigative journalism. It tells the gripping story of a real-life encounter between townsfolk and soldiers of the Mexican armed forces in Florentino’s hometown of Metlatónoc in the year 2000. The troops opened fire on an innocent crowd during Metlatónoc’s most sacred holiday, the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, leading to a tense standoff between civilians and soldiers that would change the course of the community’s history.

In Mexican news outlet La Jornada, after accepting the Indigenous Literatures of the Americas Prize, Florentino commented on his reasons for telling this story:

How could I not write about the violence our women and children suffer every day, the multiple violences we endure? It’s a debt I owe to my people, a story that was waiting to be told, like many others. This one is especially important to me because it put a partial stop to the violence our region had suffered at the hands of the military for decades… It’s a story that has been in our people’s memory for a long time, but has not been told by the media. I had to write it.

I see great value in translating this crónica of Ñuu Savi resistance precisely due to the original language in which it was written. Tu’un Savi has a centuries-old literary tradition dating back to Mesoamerica’s Post-Classic period, when Ñuu Savi scribes composed ornate codices of logographic text. After the Spanish invasion, Tu’un Savi writing gradually faded into obsolescence, but Tu’un Savi literature lived on through the oral tradition for centuries. Only in recent decades, as use of the language declines among younger generations, have writers like Florentino seen fit to commit their stories and songs to paper. Today, translating Tu’un Savi literature is a way to recognize the creativity and currency of this language: to prove it is not a relic of the past but rather a vibrant, malleable tool for self-expression in the present.

It is important to note, in conclusion, that my English-language version of Bullet Dance is not a translation from the Tu’un Savi original, but rather from Florentino’s own translation of the original text into Spanish. Around the world, there is an unspoken (and unfair) rule that writers of Indigenous languages must also be translators of their languages into the local lingua franca. Florentino himself would tell you that the Spanish does not perfectly capture the Tu’un Savi, just as the English does not perfectly capture the Spanish. However, every word in Spanish represents a choice on his part, and as a fellow translator, I have sought to respect his choices. I thank Florentino for this opportunity, and I hope, in the future, another translator will help his words find their way straight from Tu’un Savi to English.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon, November 2025, Tulsa, Oklahoma