“Bilingual Bitch” and Proud: Angelica Julia Dávila Reclaims Language Through Poetry

Angelica Julia Dávila is a Mexican-American poet, fiction writer, and stand-up comedian who frequently writes about bilingualism, family, heritage, and identity in her work. In March, she published her debut poetry chapbook Bilingual Bitch, which explores the complicated way of life that builds up when you’re Mexican and growing up in the U.S. Touching on themes of multilingual expression, generational conflict, and longing for a homeland, Dávila documents famous and little-known U.S.-Mexican history through her eyes, oral knowledge, and, of course, chisme.

The collection is written in both English and Spanish, showcasing a powerful blending of language and case for bilingual identity. “It’s a phrase that I’m using to reclaim my experience as a bilingual person,” she tells HipLatina, referring to the title poem, “Bilingual Bitch.” In it, she reflects on the judgment she faced both at home and in school for the way she spoke. One painful memory involved being mocked for mispronouncing the word “beach” with classmates twisting it into “bitch” because of her accent.

“That experience clearly impacted me,” she said, “but in reclaiming the word ‘bitch’ and making it into ‘bilingual bitch,’ there’s empowerment.” What began as a feeling of embarrassment and guilt around not fully knowing either language, she said, has since transformed into a source of pride — and even attitude.

Originally, poetry wasn’t something on Dávila’s mind. She began writing fiction and identified solely as a fiction writer until she started her Ph.D. program.

Although her track was in fiction and her thesis would result in a novel manuscript, she found herself writing short pieces she wasn’t sure how to categorize. She turned to a friend that she met during her program and was surprised when he suggested she turn them into poems. From there, she decided to branch out and explore other genres. In addition to a creative nonfiction workshop, she also signed up for a poetry workshop. That’s where she met faculty members like Daniel Borzutzky — who later wrote an endorsement for her book “Bilingual Bitch” — and became curious about the form and its possibilities.

She recalls how Borzutzky designed his workshops to be writer-centric, allowing students to choose how they wanted critique sessions to be structured, rather than being subjected to constant feedback. That approach helped her feel more welcomed and safe.

“I was always shy and afraid to explore poetry because I’m not someone who is well-versed in form, so there’s always been this sense of like imposter syndrome with poetry for me,” she explains. “But that supportive environment allowed me to explore some of the things that I had an interest in and see what came out of it, like getting the chance to play with mixing both languages.”

Sometimes, poems would start with a title. Other times, they began with an image or a short, snappy phrase. Over time, Dávila found herself a whole series of poems, all on similar themes of multilingualism, translation, identity, and resistance. She was heavily influenced by the work of writers like Puerto Rican poet  Roque Salas Rivera, Mexican poet Mónica de la Torre, and Paraguayan-American poet Diego Báez. But she never considered the possibility of putting them together into a larger project. It wasn’t until she lost track of how many she’d written that she printed out physical copies of each poem and realized just how many she had.

“I knew that a lot of the poems had themes that were either in conversation with each other or were very similar, about my own experience as a Mexican-American and as someone who grew up with two languages,” she says. “That was already going to be prominent in a lot of my poetry but I didn’t realize how much until I sprawled all of them on my kitchen table and made stacks based on themes of language, reconnecting with ancestry. And I saw how many poems could be put into a manuscript.”

Soon after taking inventory of her work, she went online and saw a call for manuscript submissions from Abode Press, a Texas-based anti-racist publishing press that specializes in prose and poetry chapbooks about identity, culture, and home. She was intrigued by the opportunity and set about organizing her pieces into a polished manuscript. She ended up making two major changes: taking out several poems that wouldn’t end up in the final version, and writing “pochismos, as defined by,” the final poem in the collection that ends the content on a strong note and thematically ties the book together. After being named as a semi-finalist, her book was chosen to be published.

For Dávila, being a bilingual bitch means many things: resisting formal rules of Spanish and English, switching back and forth between languages within the same sentence, and refusing to assimilate fully into either culture. But even more than that, the poem “Bilingual Bitch” became a larger symbol for her writing and newfound relationship with poetry.

“It was one of the first poems I ever wrote the explored the duality of language and especially that did it through sound,” she explains. “That poem in itself opened up all the other poems, or the possibility of other poems not only in this book but also other ones I have written. It is the one that I’m most proud of because it made me realize I could do this. Nothing was stopping me from doing this type of work.”

Looking ahead, Dávila is already at work on other projects and exciting achievements. She recently finished up the coursework for her Ph.D. program after seven years and successfully defended her dissertation. She’s also excited about traditionally publishing her novel manuscript, which she finished in the program and which she wrote with an experimental approach, blending different genres and multimedia like screenplays, poetry, footnotes, and flyers alongside prose.

“Like Bilingual Bitch, I mess around with bilingualism. One of my favorite parts in the novel is translating things incorrectly on purpose because I want to keep exploring this concept of if bilingual writers write and if so, who they’re writing for. Do you make yourself appealing to someone who isn’t well-versed in Spanish or only English-speakers?”

She’s also working on another poetry collection that again explores multilingualism and cultural family dynamics, while expanding into themes surrounding disability. She continues to pursue her interests in event production, stand-up comedy and improv, genres she sees as complementary to her writing because they allow her to bring humor into poems about otherwise tragic or uncomfortable situations.

For now, she continues to write poems and advocate for stronger representation of bilingual and bicultural writers. Her collection, she believes, is a starting point for larger conversations the community needs to have about how Latines are treated in the United States. She notes:

“Being bilingual, I’m interested in messing up inside a poem grammar and sentence-wise. I kept being told, ‘I can tell you wrote this in English first and then translated it,’ and I didn’t think it was a bad thing. So often we’re told that you have to pick one or the other but no – I’m a bilingual bitch. We should all strive to be bilingual bitches. Even if it seems like there isn’t, there is space for us bilingual writers.”