Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore

PRE-ORDER - Release Date April 2026

by Alan Chazaro

Letras Latinas selected book from the Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame in Indiana

In These Spaceships Weren’t Built For Us, Alan Chazaro launches a speculative, lyrical odyssey through Latinx identity, diaspora, and memory, where the immigrant experience becomes a poetic voyage, rooted in resistance, love, and the enduring pull of home.

In his newest poetry collection, These Spaceships Weren’t Built For Us, Alan Chazaro reconsiders the possibilities of space travel as the son of Mexican immigrants while navigating daily life across rapidly shifting social spaces. From barren gas stations in Central California during the height of the pandemic to faraway jungle planets governed by paleteros, Chazaro imagines the present and future in ways that are simultaneously bleak and dire, hopeful and beautiful, and seemingly, impossibly unrealized.

Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (Ghost City Press, 2021). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and was selected as a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellow at the University of San Francisco. A former high school teacher, he was raised by Mexican immigrants in the Bay Area and writes about the world. His work can be found in NPR, The Guardian, SLAM, GQ, L.A. Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Eater and more.

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“Chazaro transforms the ranfla, the hooptie, and the G-ride into a spaceship, a time machine. He points our gaze to the sky and we long to take flight while simultaneously holding onto our roots and what keeps our feet on the ground."—Joseph Rios, Fresno Poet Laureate and author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations