Xavier Navarro Aquino

In Loving Memory of Xavier Navarro Aquino, Writer and Painter

Xavier Navarro Aquino, a Puerto Rican artist and writer in diaspora, passed away on Wednesday, May 6th, in South Bend, Indiana. He was 36 years old. In life, he maintained himself in practice with a wide range of creative endeavors, brimming with urgency, often intentionally blurring the boundaries between prose, poetry, media, and the visual arts. Through the arts, he sought to undo the violence and “cruel amnesia” of the colonial apparatus, and Xavier was most at home in this resistance. His work brought him irreparable joy. “My ancestors,” he wrote, “would laugh at the thought of me as a writer, for that type of life was only a fairytale for white boys and girls.”

Xavier’s artistic imagination was nourished just as much by Caribbean storytellers and poets as it was by his own family and childhood in rural Puerto Rico. “Nothing gives me greater peace than the path west on that island, away from the concrete and noise.” As a novelist, he will be remembered for Velorio (Harper Collins, 2022), a significant contribution to Puerto Rican and Caribbean literature. His novel portrays life in Puerto Rico after a world-ending hurricane from the vantage point of survivors striving to build a new society yet unable to escape the machinations of ideology.

In a 2021 interview, he told NPR: “One of the things that I love about going home and being around my family or my in-laws is that we can laugh about so many things that other people… would feel very bothered about.” Even during challenging periods, Xavier delighted in life’s simple pleasures—a morning run, an intricate Star Wars-themed LEGO set, a walk with his dogs, a visit to his tattoo artist. He loved to travel, to play video games and music, to watch complex films and talk about them with friends. He loved books and read voraciously, always ready to discuss new works by emerging artists, and to mentor and affirm writers who were, themselves, beginning their journey.

A first-generation college student, Xavier began his journey studying literature and creative writing at Iowa State University where he earned a B.A. in English, Literary Studies in 2011. He then earned his M.A. in English, Caribbean Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras in 2015, and then proceeded to earn his Ph.D. in English, Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he served as a fiction editor for Prairie Schooner. A year prior to joining the University of Notre Dame in 2021 as an assistant professor of English and a faculty fellow to the Institute for Latino Studies and the Institute on Race and Resilience, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College through the American Council of Learned Societies and Emerging Voices.

Xavier published his fiction widely in some of the most prestigious literary journals in the country, including Guernica, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Tin House, and The Sewanee Review. He was a MacDowell fellow, a Tennessee Williams scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference, a waiter and then fellow at the Breadloaf Writers conference. As a fellow, he worked closely with Amina Gautier, who wrote this of his teacher persona: “Xavier is The Dark Knight… quiet, brooding, deliberate. He sat by my side, quietly observing and absorbing, and then he’d raise his chin or tilt his head and make a quiet pronouncement that would make the workshop lean in, eager for his wisdom.”

Colleagues at the University of Notre Dame honored his contributions to literature and the campus community. Mark Sanders described him as a “dedicated teacher, an enormously talented writer, and a warm and caring human being. His fiction reflected his care for the world, as Velorio can be read as a cautionary tale about how not to treat one another under the most trying conditions. He was dedicated to representing Puerto Rico and to supporting universal human rights.”

For all of Xavier’s accolades and contributions to letters, he confessed that none of it would be possible without the support of his wife, Jayleen Santiago Diaz. He wrote, “The only reason [Velorio] exists, the only reason I’m still here. Te amo, mi amor. We continue to have Paris.” In his morning runs, as a ritual of remembrance, Xavier would recite the names of family members that had left this world. “I say their names to remember. In that moment, they are not forgotten by history’s cruel amnesia. I stake that a deep sensitivity, that sometimes carries burdens of distress, is not a weakness. More so, these unintended burdens given to us by our ancestors, that sometimes feel as if you carry a corpse on your shoulders, are the only beauty we all carry…. With love, always with love.”

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