She had heard Gómez’s name before, when she traveled to Spain to translate the poems of his cousin Claribel Alegría, though nobody could say for sure whether Claribel’s cousin was working with the Salvadoran guerrillas or with the C.I.A. Forché was 27 at the time, a Midwesterner living in San Diego, with a budding reputation for her work. In “What You Have Heard Is True,” Forché traces how this initial encounter with a stranger irrevocably changed the course of her art and her life. Within a few days he persuaded Forché to make her first trip to El Salvador, just as the country was on the verge of civil war. The person who issued this cryptic statement was none other than Gómez himself - Leonel Gómez Vides, a coffee farmer from El Salvador who showed up in Southern California on the doorstep of the poet Carolyn Forché in 1977, with a bundle of papers under his arm and his two young daughters in tow.
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