Oct 10, 2018
When Your Mother Country Becomes a Foreign Land
I grew up in the in-between: white, Hispanic, a pigment of mixtures that blended unevenly.
I grew up in the in-between: white, Hispanic, a pigment of mixtures that blended unevenly.
In Hindi, you don’t say ‘sorry;’ you ask for forgiveness. So, growing up, I made the mistake of apologizing for who I am.
“Nobody will stop a young blond girl, that’s the truth,” you said. This was when I grew angry with you, when I wanted to scrap our week-old friendship.
“I felt as if the world was coming to an end.”
The roadside cross is a jarring balance of the emotional poles, internal and external, surely an action by and for the remaining soul—not the one who has departed.
For me, loss of faith was hollowing. Can you believe in miracles without believing in God?
I felt my mom’s grip tighten around my hand as dozens surged across the Rio Grande, the water waist-high. Adults held children in their arms or carried them in rebozos across their backs. We watched as the Border Patrol agents caught and detained some people while dozens more ran past.
German chemists. They empowered us, they ruined us, they controlled so very much.
What makes immigrant parents like mine worthy of love, respect, and admiration in our country?
How two diasporas shaped who I am.
As a black man in the field of social work, my dad was, as a white female coworker of his once put it, “like a fly in buttermilk.”
I’d get up at six a.m. every Saturday, to be at the drugstore by seven. There I could fill my father's chemotherapy prescription.
“Today’s Turkey is a place where about half of the population is utterly dismayed by the state of affairs, while the other half couldn’t be more thrilled.”
This “heritage site” has been home to my family since the 1940s.
What a strange place the internet is, where we can reach a stranger by the slip of a key—or get their mail.
Statues and monuments tell us about ourselves mostly, what we hope to remember and be remembered by.
Burro was regarded by his contemporaries as a crazy person.
Collecting and burning wood, I felt close to my family. It was something tangible, something that kept us warm.
An inverse relationship between the price of a drink and Turkey’s stability.
“One in ten people in Houston is undocumented. And for them the storm is scary on many levels.”
