A shared language, written from the margins

Original drawing for Ojalá by @pazconadie.

Book review • Gabriela Toro Aguilar • September 17, 2026 • Leer en castellano 

I came across the fanzine-book El taller de escritura (The Writing Workshop), by Ecuadorian writer Cristina Burneo Salazar, when the independent Mexican publishing house Invertidas invited me to present it in Chiapas last June.

The Writing Workshop showcases moments and exercises from various writing workshops the author led in southeast Mexico and in different provinces of Ecuador. The participants were women with deep community roots, committed to local anti-extractivist struggles.

Months before the presentation in San Cristóbal de las Casas, performing arts creator Tamara Guiñansaca staged a dramatic reading of The Writing Workshop in Quito. As in the fanzine-book, the dialogue was in Kichwa, Mixe, and Spanish.

As an essayist, Burneo Salazar won the 2025 Casa de las Américas Prize in the category Studies on Latinos in the United States for her book Dime si son latinxs: writings of the Ecuadorian diaspora in the U.S.A. Twenty-five years ago, she won the Aurelio Espinosa Pólit Prize for El Sueño de Pierre Menard.

Her book of narrative stories, Historias de desobediencia, compiles eight years of stories about the protagonists of migrant struggles, the fight against extractivism, and the fight against gender-based violence in a changing and complex Ecuador.

Burneo has published three books on poetry, translation, and feminist genealogies—fields in which she is also a professor.

Alongside her writing, Burneo has been active in anti-prison, transfeminist, migrant, and academic freedom organizing. In Ecuador and Chiapas, various collectives, grassroots organizations, and projects know her for her support in processes of writing, justice, and memory.

On the edge of convention

The writing workshop is a piece of narrative nonfiction, which the author defines as a nonfiction story. In my view, a piece of narrative nonfiction does not necessarily involve a conflict that drives the plot, as is the case here. In the refusal to pin down a genre, there is a playful interchange between text and other forms. It is the need for experience that seeks its own language

Therein lies the first interpretive principle: breaking certain literary conventions, like the notion that creative writing is fiction or that the narrative voice is fixed. This is apparent in how the narrative voice shifts from second person to first person to third person plural. The narrator speaks with both distance and intimacy.

The narrator becomes part of a nosotras-mujeres: “we-women,” conveying a collective female entity. The narrator writes and looks toward “some of those women” who write, reaching out to those who read. The narrator is extremely aware, writing alongside other women. In the section Las diosas venden empanadas (“The Goddesses Sell Empanadas”), the narrator tells us:

You’ll see their spirits enduring through time, awake behind the bus, the mobile fridge, or the natural food stall. You’ll see how their rivers speak to them, churning their distant riverbeds all the way to that street… They know this world well. And they tell their stories so that tomorrow, the little girls who are the apples of their eyes will no longer suffer… We carry within us something silenced, long dammed up. When we find ourselves in the untamed word, that silenced thing becomes a mighty river. (Emphasis mine).

There are 10 writing exercises interspersed throughout the story. Thus, the language draws on multiple registers to convey the workshop experience. For example, Exercise 5 suggests: “Describe how we speak, when we fall silent, what made us give up our voice”; or Exercise 7: “Telling our story is also a way of speaking the world anew.”

Each exercise, which acknowledges the world these women face, is a call to transformation.

I’ll venture an interpretation: those grammatical persons and the two writing registers (the narrative and the exercises) allude to a multiplicity. The narrator is conscious of being part of a whole while stepping back from the scene being described. Because the women who write are distinct from one another, just as their lives are. The heterogeneity that runs through the plot is its defining feature. The bodies that are—those of women (of different ages, from the countryside, the city, domestic workers, street vendors, farmworkers)—stay in the foreground.

Writing with the body

The body is the common thread of The Writing Workshop—as is writing as a collective exercise. Material and subjective existence weave together in the different moments of the story. 

There’s the initial encounter between the characters in the workshop, the joyful unruliness of their learning process, or when they recognize their different languages: there are fragments in Kichwa and Mixe, alongside references to those who do not hear with their ears but with their sense of touch, or those who think outside the lockstep of commercial production. 

There’s the vision that reveals life in its raw state (impoverishment, territorial dispossession, uprooting) but is transformed through disobedience.

In The Writing Workshop, the body traces a presence of pleasure—uncomfortable, erotic, and historical. “Between her breasts beats the magnificent muscle of memory,” she writes, or “There is no greater language among us.” Or:

Our voices were fading, like pouring water on a warm ember. We renounced the scream, the laughter, or the tears—and their subversion. But the splendor of a burst of laughter, the golden sea of a word rising above a field of silences—how could we not let that honey spill over us? (emphasis my own).

This led me to question: how does one write on the margins of the art market? How can we bring certain forms of written creation down from the lofty tower and place them at the level of the damp caverns of everyday life?

In The Writing Workshop, we see those who are doing just that at different rhythms: leisurely, chaotic, drawn-out, and surprising. It is a tempo intertwined with the struggles of these women organized within their communities and their persistence in not diluting their desires within shared horizons.

Other ways of writing

To be another, to be one, to be many—the characters are inhabited by a multitude inscribed in memory. That’s why I can’t help but think of The Arrival at Writing by Hélène Cixous: what it means to write, and what it entails to do so when some have been denied a voice.

In my view, one of The Writing Workshop's greatest contributions is to propose another kind of writing, where the experiences of women and gender dissidents are not belittled. Instead, it advocates a practice that makes room for our bodies without abandoning exercise, experimentation, or even recognition of certain traditions. 

In The Writing Workshop, language seeks to break free from the worn-out, rotten, and narrow confines of criminal justice. Burneo’s work invites us to find the words to point at the abyss and laugh at it, while standing on its edge.