Diego Báez’s explores his Paraguayan American experience with great insight and vulnerability in his poetry collection Yaguareté White.
Growing up in Bnorm, IL, two genres dominated our household boombox: Christian rock and Paraguayan folk. Also, Kenny G. (Mom was a fan.) The arpa and accordion of polka paraguaya spun almost exclusively on bootleg CDs burned and returned undeclared on flights back from Asunción. Occasionally, cassettes.
Yaguareté White came together, slowly, over the course of 15 years. But the book’s narratives, images, and fables stretch back to my earliest memories: Curled up on the floor of a jet over the Amazon, en route to São Paulo or Buenos Aires, before that fourth and final airborne leg to my father’s home country.
These tracks derive from the time of the poems’ inspiration, composition, and revision. This playlist is a soundtrack to the life of the book, and my hope is a part of myself—my heart, the places I call home—translates through this playlist.
Shout out to J-Sick, aka Justin Hopkins, of Bloomington, Illinois. Unfortunately, his music isn’t available on Spotify. (But I implore you to give “Grippin’ on My Rosary” a listen.)
“Cascada” by Trío los Paraguayos
As a kid, I thought Paraguayan music was all accordion and harp, corny refrains. Every song the same. Of course, “Cascada” is but one example of why my silly young self was just flat-out wrong. It’s a breathtaking piece of music, filled with dramatic crescendos that create a compelling, heavenly soundscape. And tell me that refrain doesn’t sound exactly like a waterfall. In addition to the version performed by Trío Los Paraguayos, I highly recommend the rendition by Marcelo Rojas on YouTube.
“Ballad of the Red Balloon” by Blue and Brown Books
Uploaded nearly 15 years ago, this track takes me way, way back to the wandering years between college and grad school, when a few of the poems in Yaguareté White first began scraping into shape. At the time, a dear friend from high school, Kyle Ferguson, released an album under the band name, Blue and Brown Books. The name originates from notes dictated to Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s students at Cambridge in the 1930s, which is fitting, since Kyle went on to obtain a doctorate in actual philosophy and has authored many articles with incredibly abstruse-sounding titles. To my knowledge, he hasn’t produced any more music, which makes me sad, the way fate may fork two paths once thought to align. (I still owe Kyle a call.) Blue and Brown Books’ short, self-titled album’s worth a listen in its entirety, but this track really captures the effervescence of transition between young adulthood and the rest of life.
“Like Me and You” by Raffi
This track would never have registered were it not for the birth of my child a few years ago, which, yes, upended my life, but also added a new dimension to the book, one I could not have imagined without her. I already thought a lot about representation, and the lack thereof, and now it’s especially important to me that my child hear her Tati’s country named in popular, mainstream media.
Despite the narrow—if forgivable—binaries casually endorsed by the song (“each one is much like another / A child of a mother and a father / A very special son or daughter”), Raffi does well (at least by 1985 standards) to diversify the roll call of countries that comprises the rest of the lyrics. And when “Rosa from Paraguay” gets a shout-out at 1:42, I’m always still so tickled. So tickled, in fact, that I include her in my list of “Famous Fictional Paraguayans” in Yaguareté White.
“Come to Life” by Kanye West
It’s a complicated time to profess fandom for Kanye. I can’t say I still do. And yet, I can’t deny the outsize impact his music has had on my life, ever since College Dropout landed almost exactly twenty years ago. So many Kanye songs have accompanied me in the car, on a run, while I write, at the gym, in the club, elsewhere. I suspect the same is true for a lot of people.
Take this track, for example, which I include because it coincided with a particularly important time in my life: the moment I opened an email from the Assistant Editor at UA Press with a contract to publish Yaguareté White. At the tail end of two years of pandemic uncertainty, new fatherhood to boot, and countless faceless tiles haunting my online classes, I’d begun to wonder whether my poems would ever enter the world. What coincidence then, to hear these lyrics on a sunny September afternoon (one month before Kanye’s reprehensible rhetoric against Jewish people unraveled whatever affinity I still felt):
Did those ideas ever really come to life?
Make it all come to life, make it all come to life
Praying for a change in your life
Well, maybe it’s gon’ come tonight
The song itself is slow and hopeful, gently optimistic, honest about introspection, sadness, and conflicting feelings. Even so, “problematic” is a dangerously insufficient term to describe Kanye’s antisemitic comments of 2022 (and before, and since). I can forgive the man his loud, episodic bouts with mental illness. But I refuse to forget the horrible, hateful things he continues to profess about people close to me and my family.
“Doo Wop (That Thing)” by Lauryn Hill
Flashback: 9th grade, University High (U High? U know it!), Normal, Illinois. My girlfriend at the time—who tolerated so many very, very bad love poems—and I had just broken up.
I’m in my parents’ basement—they had not yet split up—listening to this album, sobbing, until they both come downstairs to console me. We listen to Hill’s unmatched vocals in darkness for a few minutes before I start to feel better.
Talk about another artist whose behavior off-stage raises eyebrows and alienates former fans. But if you want to hear an actually #blessed vocalist and lyricist in her prime, here you go. (Please also enjoy the hella endearing skit appended to the end of this track.)
“Sang Fezi” by Wyclef Jean (feat. Lauryn Hill)
Okay, flash further back: 7th grade, I’d only just discovered Edgar Allan Poe and Eminem, whose lyrics influenced the aforementioned love poems with all kinds of complicated internal rhyme schemes. But Wyclef’s The Carnival was the first album that really blew me away, for its beats and storytelling, its interstitial material and stylistic breadth, and, notably, Wyclef’s uniquely Haitian spin on hip hop. It was the first time I heard multicultural, multilingual intermingling in music I loved, and it forever shaped the ways I think about verse, performance, authenticity, and persona.
“Guantanamera” by Trío los Paraguayos
A cover of the classic Cuban song, based on a poem by José Martí, this guajira-son number celebrates the people and culture of the island. Its guitar and birdsongs remind me so much of a Paraguayan DJ whose recordings include birdcalls, whoops, and hollers, but I can’t locate it for the life of me.
It’s important at this point to say that Paraguay has problems with racism, not unlike anywhere. I attempt to address this in the book, particularly in one postcard poem that arrives from Emboscado, a town in Paraguay where 80% of residents claim African ancestry. It’s not a place I’ve ever been to, but it’s an integral part of the country’s landscape and identity, one historian Shawn Michael Austin unpacks in his fascinating study, Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay.
“El Poropompero” by Trío los Paraguayos
I used this track in a video trailer for the book (way back in June 2023), and I think it fucking slaps.
“Use This Gospel” by Kanye West, Clipse, Kenny G
I have a complicated relationship with my Catholic upbringing: I’ve disavowed the catechism and nasty histories of abuse and oppression, but I miss the rhythms and rituals of Mass, the certainties that attend an hour in the presence of other devoted followers committed to group worship. Supposedly born of a desire to create more healing music, this track appeared on Kanye’s Christian album, Jesus Is King. While legacies of religious conversion (and coercion) haunt the pages of Yaguareté White, I include this song because it’s such a strange confluence of musical touchstones from my past: Kanye, of course, but also Kenny G, an unlikely throwback to the early ‘90s CDs I remember well from childhood. Plus, rap group Clipse reunited for the track, with the brothers Pusha T and No Malice agreeing to record and perform it together, an act of reconciliation which resonates with me. Not that my brothers and I have ever had (or had to repair) a career-ending falling out, but I wrote so much of the book with my brothers in mind, it’s impossible not to feel at least an inkling of recognition.
“Work It (Soulwax Remix)” by Marie Davidson
I’d say this track is most emblematic of the kind of music I listen to while writing: dance, drum n bass, trip hop, house. Lyrics usually throw me off, but Davidson’s are so cooly confident, conversational and confrontational, like she wants to motivate the listener by negging them, and each line hits like a perfectly timed punch straight to the temporal lobe. This track closes out the video version of Maison Margiela’s 2020 Spring-Summer ‘Défilé’ collection, which is where I first heard it.
“JOY (Unspeakable)” by Voices of Fire, feat. Pharrell Wiliams
The first track that made me want to do a playlist. Late June, 2023. Pharrell debuts his Men’s Spring-Summer 2024 Collection from Louis Vuitton at the Pont Neuf in Paris. It’s glorious. The opening orchestral number is ethereal and childlike, full of dreaming and wonder, with its piano and slumber party PJs, one model with teddy bear in tow. The choir, Voices of Fire, joins the stage right as an unreleased single by Clipse tapers off (the rap duo walk the show in the baddest pearled bombers I’ll never in many lifetimes be able to afford). “JOY” is so unfettered in its explosive choral elation, overwhelming in its full-throated, celebratory exaltation, raucous with “unspeakable joy.” It brings tears to my eyes just typing it, I’m not kidding. Because it struck me last summer as exactly what the world needs: unironic jubilation, exuberant and outrageous in its contagion. I replay the stream at the breakfast table with my kid. Many times.
“Earth Song” by Michael Jackson
Crickets, a harp. Jungle sounds. Miguel observes screen time. Armando naps. Solo piano, synth.
“What about sunrise?” MJ intones. “What about rain?”
Dinner in an hour or two. Breeze outside, and sun. Always so much sun.
“Earth Song” swells for the first time.
Is it Game Boy Miguel plays? Pokemon? That hella well-worn copy of Tetris? Or did we have flip phones already?
“What have we done to the world? What have we done?”
Our primos used to huddle at the screen door that entered onto our room, but we didn’t always want to play.
“Did you ever stop to notice this crying Earth, these weeping shores?”
“Earth Song” swells for the second.
Miguel pauses whatever he’s playing.
“What’s this song about?”
…
…
“Earth.”
…
MJ goes off at 3:17.
… … … … …
Crickets, a harp. Jungle sounds.
Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (Univ. Arizona, 2024), a finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the Berkshire Prize for Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, the Poetry Foundation Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, and DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Diego has served on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle, the International David Foster Wallace Society, and Families Together Cooperative Nursery School. Poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Freeman’s, Poetry Northwest, and Latino Poetry: A New Anthology. Diego lives in Chicago and teaches poetry, English composition, and first-year seminars at the City Colleges, where he is an Assistant Professor of Multidisciplinary Studies.