Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig...
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...
Escritor es el que borra...Cortar, podar: encontrar una forma que ya estaba ahíPero las palabras no son plantas y, en todo caso, los jardines son para los poetas de corazón: los de corazón ajardinado....
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.
New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was ou...
As if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?
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...
I read them like I had to finish an infinite bowl of lukewarm soup.
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,...
But we weren't going to risk it. I said, focus on your picture, and so you drew a girl figure and wrote Sir Fus In Love, and then said it said Sara Falls In Love. I didn't want to correct your spellin...
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...
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...
The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.