By Rossana Longo Better
La Ciudad had the opportunity to attend a “secret poet society” gathering in downtown Denver for the launch of Volume 2 of the Dystopian Times, a magazine created by youth activists. The event, held at Green Spaces, showcased the work of community writers and artists addressing issues such as gentrification, displacement and media narratives.
Contributors Mario Reyes and Honey Buendía shared their insights on the publication’s mission to take control of the narrative and uplift marginalized voices, particularly from neighborhoods such as Globeville and Elyria/Swansea, where gentrification has dramatically affected Latino families.
Reyes and Buendía talked about the invisibility that many marginalized groups face, particularly when only being valued or recognized during election seasons. The conversation dives into the need for self-organization within the Latinx community, the importance of cross-racial solidarity, and how collective efforts in areas such as food sustainability, education and housing can counter gentrification and empower the community to shape its own narrative.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
🎙️La Ciudad: Please tell us about how you guys started the Dystopian Times and what is special about this edition. What’s the difference between this one and the first?
Honey Buendía: Yes, this is the second one. The difference is that we have more community collaborations. More people have come together — artists, organizers — to shed light on the issues going on right now in real time. It’s about telling their stories and giving them an outlet to express how they feel about those situations.
Mario Reyes: Really this came out of conversations with me and my friends, my colleagues and my comrades, and really we just wanted to create a space where there’s an intersection between art and political education and creativity and activism.
We didn’t feel like that space existed yet. We see a lot of organizations operating in silos where there’s an art organization here and a political organization here, but they’re not in communication. So we wanted to create a space where artists, organizers, activists and community members could come and tell their stories and tell it their way and with their language and their words.
🎙️La Ciudad: Why is it important to take control of the narrative?
Reyes: One, I think as we’ve seen recently, we can’t always trust the media, and that’s on both sides. From a Democratic perspective and a Republican perspective, it’s very clear that when people are broadcasting news, there are agendas, and those agendas are not of the people and for the people.
So we wanted to create a space where the people could come and share their own agendas, share their own stories, share their own plans and dreams and visions, because without a space that we’ve created, we will not always get that voice in other mediums and in other broadcasted news.
🎙️La Ciudad: What are you hoping that this night will bring to the people who witness your presentation of Dystopian Times?
Reyes: I hope people will be inspired. I hope people will want to come out and join us as writers, as thinkers, as organizers, as political strategists. Oftentimes people have the motivation to do something, and bring change in the world, but they don’t know how. So we want to provide that starting point. Even here in our space tonight, we have a whole section where one of our members is giving out political education books from various perspectives from various different voices and identities and groups in the country.
We also have a space where you can come and paint and write letters to your ancestors, write letters to loved ones who have passed away. Because we also believe that processing trauma and processing grief is a part of activism and is a part of political strategy. So we want a space where a person can be inspired to be themselves, come out, and get involved with projects.
🎙️La Ciudad: You mentioned the media. Why is media so pervasive right now, especially for the community? Why is it so damaging?
Buendía: It’s damaging because it’s targeting specific groups of people — our community, the “gente.” And it’s not done in an uplifting way.
🎙️La Ciudad: Do you have any stories in this magazine?
Buendía: Yes, I have two pieces. One is about the gentrification and the assault on GES — Globeville, Elyria and Swansea — which is just two blocks from here. It’s about how families are being displaced and why. The second piece is more personal, about my own life and why I started focusing on economic empowerment and encouraging others to put their money to work in the community.
🎙️La Ciudad: In these times, when young people are struggling to find affordable housing, with high rents and scarce job opportunities, what are they feeling, especially with the displacement you mentioned?
Buendía: From my own experience, a lot of young people feel like they don’t deserve better things or that they can’t achieve what other communities, like white people, can. They make us feel like we’re not allowed to have those things.
🎙️La Ciudad: Recently, in a Latino research panel, there was a discussion about the lack of funding for education here in Colorado, particularly for public schools. Many young people are coming from outside to take jobs that locals should be getting. What do you think about that? Is it a lack of education?
Buendía: I wouldn’t say it’s a lack of education. It’s more a lack of respect for diverse cultures. Especially in schools, there’s a system in place — the school-to-prison pipeline — which targets students of color. They don’t want us to succeed or to get the high-paying jobs others have access to. They’d rather have us in the economy as workers to keep the system going.
🎙️La Ciudad: Now let’s move on to what’s happening tonight. Can you tell us about it?
Buendía: Tonight, we’re going to have a ton of fun. We have lots of performers showcasing their art, and we’ll be highlighting Volume 2 of Dystopian Times. People who contributed will read their pieces, and we’ll bring humor and light to these serious issues. We want it to feel relatable and uplifting, even when we’re talking about heavy topics.
🎙️La Ciudad: Why is humor such a powerful tool for dissolving trauma and making people feel empowered?
Buendía: Everyone loves to laugh, and humor lifts the vibe. It helps people understand the seriousness of a topic without bringing them down. It lifts you up while making you think.
🎙️La Ciudad: Great! Give me the titles of the pieces you wrote.
Buendía: My writer name is Honey Bee and I wrote “Hood Talk” and “The Game.”
🎙️La Ciudad: Mario, please tell me what you wrote and the stories you have created.
Reyes: My writer name is Mark Question. I wrote a few pieces. One is called “The Declaration of Interdependence.” This is a parody of the Declaration of Independence, where essentially I state that we are not individualistic. We are not independent of each other. Instead, we are interdependent. We are dependent on each other and we make up each other’s reality. So we have to take care of each other.
Another piece I wrote is called “Buddhism and the Art of Heart Revolution.” This is not a call for people to become Buddhists. Instead, it’s a call for people to explore other perspectives outside of the very individualistic Western colonial perspective that we’ve been fed, that we are separate from our planet, that we are separate from each other. And instead I want to encourage people to explore perspectives where we are fluid, we are interconnected and that we recognize the value in each other.
Finally I have the fourth poetry hour with Mark Question. Those are four original poems. The first one is called the “Topography of my Face.” This is a poem about me falling back in love with my features and my skin color, because I did not always believe that they were beautiful.
The second is called “Colfax, Denver.” This is a poem about capitalism and how we can be in the middle of so much wealth while also in the middle of so much poverty and misery. The third is called “Chorizo and Egg,” and that’s a poem for my mom and how she used to make me breakfast tacos in the morning with refried beans and chorizo and salchichas and egg tacos. At school, to eat these tacos because I thought people were judging me for being too Mexican or for being too whatever in my little brown paper bag. So that’s a poem dedicated to my mom.
And then finally I have a poem called “Douche,” and this is a poem for all the gays out there. Many times the perspective of gay poetry is from the perspective of coming out. Coming out stories and trauma and as a gay person, there are so many other nuanced experiences that we have. So “Douche” is about those nuanced experiences.
🎙️La Ciudad: The election is coming in, like, 40-something days. They say that people of color and especially, one of the biggest minorities, the Latinos, are going to be the ones deciding who the next president is.
It seems like they are giving us a lot of power, but at the same time, we only exist when elections come. I recently was present in a panel discussion and they were talking about how invisible you can be. What are your thoughts?
Reyes: So the question I heard was around the invisibility that oftentimes we groups are only represented or valued during election years. And really, …right now we’re in a time where both Democrats and Republicans have supported genocide in Gaza and in Palestine.
And as we can see from both parties, we can’t trust the leadership from either one. So …I would say that during those periods that we are invisible, we have to be organized amongst ourselves.
That means that Latinos are coming together with other races, that Latinos are coming together with themselves and that we are coming together across many different spectrums of identities, and we are organizing ourselves so that when the next four years comes up, we’re not waiting for someone to come save us.
Instead, we are able to save ourselves through food sustainability, we’re able to save ourselves through education and maintaining home ownership so that when gentrification comes, it’s not pushing people and displacing people out of their neighborhoods. And it means that, like we’re doing here tonight, we control the narrative of how we view ourselves.
I don’t need anyone to value me. I value myself and my people value us and we value each other as a community. And this is the way that we stopped the invisibility because we’re always seen by each other.
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