A mi no me afligen esa clase de preocupaciones porque nunca tuve cualidades efímeras. Yo solo tengo de las permanentes.
Stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics, and signed the contract
Sargasso Sea, which, the boy says, gets its name from the enormous quantities of sargassum seaweed that float there, almost motionless, trapped by currents that circle clockwise.
Our mother teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.
Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change mas...
My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word.
However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast,...
The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpreter...
That’s the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree. It’s all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.
My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story.
I read them like I had to finish an infinite bowl of lukewarm soup.
But I suppose it’s always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as...
As if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?
Writer and former Border Patrol officer Francisco Cantú has written poignantly about these death maps and all the clearly marked ghosts that dot the wide deserts in the southern United States.
When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produc...
The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny.
More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months....
Impossible to know why items like these can reveal such important things about a person; and difficult to understand the sudden melancholy they produce in that person’s absence.
I suddenly realized he probably didn’t know the difference between a noun and a verb. So I asked him. He looked up at the ceiling theatrically, and after a few seconds said yes, of course he knew: nou...
Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken.