“The Aunts” by Carina del Valle Schorske

As we celebrate Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month, we honor the diaspora’s rich contributions to, and profound influence on, arts and culture in the US and beyond. This four-part poetry series invites Latinx poets to explore and respond to a work in MoMA’s collection.

“At first, this painting made me uncomfortable—the taxonomic title, the way the nudity of Brown women always feels so overdetermined. Still, I was interested in my own discomfort, and in the mysterious relations among the people depicted, including the painter poised beyond the frame,” says Carina del Valle Schorske of Mexican painter Julio Castellanos’s The Aunts. Del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn whose magazine work focuses on the relationship between popular culture and politics in the Caribbean and beyond. Castellanos’s pensive composition motivated her to switch writing gears: “I haven’t tried to write a poem in almost six years—I mostly write nonfiction now—so I figured I should follow my first strong feeling, even, or especially, a feeling like shame.” She described how the artist’s work relates to themes explored throughout her writing: “I’m always interested in how individuality gets formed in a world crowded with others, and when or whether individuality is worth fighting for. I was fascinated to learn that Julio Castellanos signed so few of his paintings. In his lifetime, he was well known for his work as a set designer for theater and dance, and there seems to be, there, something to explore about collective creativity.”

Del Valle Schorske joins a number of esteemed poets who have contributed original poems to Magazine. We present “The Aunts” in honor of Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month, which is celebrated annually from September 15 to October 15.

Julio Castellanos. The Aunts. 1933. Oil on canvas

Between a grown woman and her naked image,
a motherless child. Motherless because unwanted
and unreal. Still, she cries and snatches at the woman’s mind,
as if to say—you don’t need to be my mother to save my life.
The woman not belonging only to herself but more so to the aunts
who she resembles, a little at the mouth and again around the eyes,
the forms transforming in her. Is this what lasting looks like?
Or maybe there are two grown women, though they seem
the same—the mother and her sister, the child not motherless
but overmothered, like the “Blacks and Puerto Ricans”
of colonial reports. All potentially perfectible by city code.

Many times I was naked, between, among—
a fact of family structure but also a vocation. The fates,
sirens, gopis, girl groups, the women’s circle where I learned
to speak, associate, and disassociate. When the painter came,
they posed but turned their backs so they wouldn’t see him choose
his angle. He was a genius for setting stages. Died young.
Assuming, as we must, that the women there were real—
assuming an arrangement between the painter and his Aunts,
the sky, the tattered curtain—who else were they to him?

Now, collecting the blood that keeps coming
in its little plastic cup, dumb to the disaster, I watch it
wind slow through the water in the can, then feed it
to my ferns, my fiddle leaf. And when I kiss a man,
there’s a child at the window, watching, saying I see you
to me in plural, tunnel of reflections in his bathroom mirror,
wavering nameless like the painter who, fearing patrimony
or perhaps perfection, signed nearly nothing. And even
those he did claim—I took two trains to face those figures—
turned out to be untouchable, hidden assets, not on view.
Still, I see The Aunts onscreen, and together (no one’s
if not mine) they touch me like that child does, insisting.

Carina del Valle Schorske

Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator of Puerto Rican poetry. She has been published in many venues, including the Believer, the New Yorker, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She won a National Magazine Award for her cover story on grief and belonging on apocalyptic dance floors in 2021, and she earned her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University in 2022. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead.