The Rumpus Launches El Alboroto, a new home for Spanish-Language Writing
HAVANA TIMES – On July 30, the independent literary magazine The Rumpus launched El Alboroto, a new section devoted to original writing in Spanish and intended to bring Spanish-speaking writers more fully into the magazine’s literary community.
Founded in San Francisco in 2009, The Rumpus has long published fiction, poetry, essays, criticism, comics and interviews, with an emphasis on work that may struggle to find a home in more conventional literary outlets. The magazine is currently owned by writer Roxane Gay and designer and writer Debbie Millman, who acquired it in May 2025.
El Alboroto represents the magazine’s first dedicated expansion into Spanish. In announcing the section, founding editors Alejandra Márquez and Vasthi Jean-Michel emphasized that the project is not intended simply to reproduce the magazine’s English-language work in another language.
“No se trata de una traducción de los textos de The Rumpus ni de una sección secundaria,” they wrote. Instead, El Alboroto is envisioned as a space of its own for Spanish-speaking writers both inside and outside the United States.
The section accepts fiction, poetry, comics, personal essays, cultural criticism, book reviews and interviews. Its editors say they are interested in both emerging and established writers, particularly work that experiments formally, engages critically with contemporary culture or may not fit easily within more traditional publishing spaces.
The launch also arrives at a politically charged moment for Spanish-speaking communities in the United States. Márquez and Jean-Michel explicitly situated the project against the backdrop of immigration policy and hostility toward Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities, describing the section as a place where such experiences can be written about openly.
There is also a notable connection to Cuba. Jean-Michel, who was born in Haiti, studied medicine in Havana, where she learned Spanish. She has said that during her years in Cuba she became deeply influenced by the storytelling of writers including Alejo Carpentier and Nicolás Guillén. She now writes and edits across Spanish, English and Haitian Creole, with particular interests in Caribbean and Latin American literature, magical realism, history and the legacies of colonialism.
Márquez, meanwhile, is an associate professor of Spanish at Michigan State University whose research includes contemporary Latin American literature, queer studies, Mexican chronicle, gender, state violence and Latinx literature and culture. The current Rumpus masthead lists Márquez, Jean-Michel and Sergio Muro as the editors of El Alboroto.
The section has moved quickly from announcement to publication. In its first weeks, El Alboroto has featured Ave Barrera Garcia’s “Penrose,” Francesca Dennstedt García’s “Fire Play,” Sergio Muro’s conversation with Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, “Hendiduras y fronteras en la ficción,” and, most recently, Andrea Villa Franco’s “Amelia,” published August 18.
For writers, the new section also offers a paid publishing opportunity. El Alboroto is currently accepting submissions through The Rumpus’s Submittable portal. Work must be previously unpublished, submissions may be no longer than 2,500 words, and writers are asked to include a cover letter of no more than one page along with a short third-person biography.
The magazine says El Alboroto pays the same rates as its English-language sections: $500 for prose and comics and $200 for poetry.
For a publication that has spent more than 15 years cultivating unconventional literary voices in English, El Alboroto is a significant widening of the door.