Over the decade it took Silver Lake author Yesika Salgado to achieve social media popularity with her writing, the jacaranda trees outside her neighborhood haunt Café Tropical have been witness to the triumphs and challenges that made her the poet she is today.
Dropping out of high school, working as a cashier at CVS and falling in and out of love inspired Salgado to write poems that she would share on Instagram, where she has amassed over 170,000 followers.
“Up until 2016, I had to work service jobs,” said Salgado, 41. “I worked as a cashier in a parking garage for like 10 years. I knew what it was like to be on your lunch break, eating your life, being tired, your feet sore, and scrolling on your phone just looking for something. I wanted my work to be something that would find those people in the most accessible place: on their phones.”
In doing so, Salgado joined a growing community of poets on social media — helping revive an art form which is being consumed at higher rates among U.S. young adults in recent years.
Viral social media trends like “Instapoetry” and #poetrytok have allowed Latinos to not only access literature that resonates with them, but to feel empowered to become writers as well, said Patrícia Lino, an associate professor of poetry and visual arts at UCLA.
A century ago, the democratization of poetry was only a dream. Today, everyone can be a poet thanks to social media, Lino said.
“The death of poetry has been declared many times throughout history, but it’s always transforming — and recently, it has transformed due to social media,” Lino said.
With poetry no longer being confined to academic journals or classrooms, Latinos have been able to break through in the publishing industry, where they make up 7% of writers and authors, according to a 2022 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
“It’s surreal that my poems are in places that I thought I physically didn’t belong to,” said Salgado. “To know that my work is part of curriculums and it’s read and studied.”
Social media allowed Salgado to cultivate a loyal readership by sharing her poetry for free before even signing her first publishing contract for her book, “Corazón.” The cover is illustrated by a mango tree, symbolizing her parents’ home country of El Salvador. This is the first book out of the trilogy poetry collection that made her a No. 3 bestsellerin Amazon’s Hispanic American subcategory.
“I was just writing poems about my crazy-ass family. It’s just so wild that the purest parts of me, the most nooks and crannies, are the ones that people connect with the most,” Salgado said. “Especially, when I spent so many years trying to become what I thought people wanted. And the whole time, what people wanted was what I thought was undesirable.”
Finding healing and representation in poetry
In 2021, the Los Angeles-based Mexican American author Celia Martínez decided to post videos on TikTok and Instagram of herself — crying, or with no makeup on — while reciting poems about modern dating and the challenges of being a first-generation Latina college student.
“Social media is a very public place. I could have done [poetry] privately, but it’s one of those things that you also realize how beneficial it is to see someone that looks like you, to hear someone that sounds like you have those same feelings,” Martinez said.
With the support of the more than 5 million followers who tune into her bilingual poetry on her social media accounts, Diary of a Romantica and Power House of the Cel, Martínez has gone from Yale graduate to influencer and author of four books — including 2025’s “A Magnificently Ordinary Romance,” which is distributed by Simon and Schuster.
“I would think of my profile as sort of a really cute living room/open garden. And people could come in and have a little cafecito, or a little tea and listen to poetry,” Martínez said. But she wants this space to exist in real life too.
Social media has allowed the 26-year-old to earn money from her books, which Martínez uses to continue her training in medicine, a passion she wants to combine with poetry.
After volunteering as a Spanish interpreter at a free clinic during college, Martínez said her dream has become to fund a community garden, where her patients receive therapeutic treatment through the healing properties of sharing their stories — the same way she did on social media.
Making poetry more accessible and culturally significant
For the 30-year-old self-published author Vianney Harelly, writing poetry is an “imperfect, messy and ugly” process, where she is allowed to break all the rules that would limit her creativity.
With ribbon bows that she sources from L.A.’s Fashion District, grammatically incorrect Spanglish poems and videos from her hometown of Tijuana, Harelly specializes in visually-enriched literature that feels compelling for other bilingual Latina creatives from the border.
“Being someone who is invited into universities and high schools, it just makes me feel really proud of myself but also very honored to be able to be the person that I needed when I was these people’s age,” Harelly said. “These people need to see that it is possible to be an author, to be a poet.”
After Harelly moved to the Bay Area to study creative writing at San Francisco State University, the bookworm felt a massive disconnect from the Eurocentric, English work she was assigned to read in her classes. Harelly told one of her college professors she was considering switching majors because she felt like she didn’t belong.
“They emailed me back, and they were like: ‘There must be other people that feel like that too. Consider staying to be that person for other people,’” Harelly said.
As her poetry videos became more popular on the internet in 2021, she started selling books, journals and prints through social media, where she has grown an audience of over 220,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok.
“If I have never ever touched social media, there’s no way that I could be where I am today,” Harelly said. “It has opened many doors for me and many doors for my art.”
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