The nation’s leading Latinx literary magazine now calls California’s Central Valley home, so it’s fitting that Huizache 9 features valley grown legends like Luis Valdez, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Gary Soto, with cover art from Chicana icon Ester Hernandez. Only Huizache showcases the well-knowns like Tim Seibles, Emmy Pérez, and Willie Perdomo with new generation voices like Sara Borjas, Carribean Fragoza, and José Olivarez. And we mix in the soon-to-be well known poets Monica Rico, Natasha Carrizosa, Jose Hernandez Diaz, and Andrés Cerpa, future-star fiction from María Isabel Álvarez, and a portfolio of striking images from Fronterizo/Bordeño printmakers: this is Huizache’s ninth edition!

Huizache may be rooted in the Southwest and the West, but we’re staking our claim to being the magazine of a New America. From the north and south of the Eastern seaboard, across the Midwest, along the Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona borderlands, and rising into the wide breadth of California to the upper reaches of the Pacific Northwest, our voices, the voices of Huizache, sing with originality and howl with passion, reorienting language and narrative, imploding the old preconceptions of our community, culture, and identity. After a difficult absence, this comeback issue, h9, overflows with what was dammed for three long years: writers who refuse to be detained, categorized, labeled, or constrained, who, like the magazine’s namesake, the huizache tree, refuse to be rooted out and flower brilliant gold year after year.