I met Carmen at a wintry college campus in Peterborough, Canada,

Just about a year ago, for three days of intense collective encounters,

We bonded around ties to Latin America, feminism and shared political bents.

In a group of five, each of us interviewed another, and she interviewed me,

Ostensibly around issues of archives, activism, aging and memory,

We also shared our dialogues with a larger circle of women from different parts of the Americas,

Discovering and confronting our otherings and otherness.

Our complicities in resistance.

(In one of the playful images of our group Carmen is pitting her bodily energy against the mantelpiece of a fireplace, a gesture that seems to sum up so much.)

Carmen shared with us her life, work and writing…

Her warmth and incisive clarity.

Aquelarre... an illegal gathering of witches... the name of the magazine she published with a collective of Latin American women in the 1980s and 1990s.

Aquelarre... our brief intense encounter imprinted in my memory with pure affect.