Issue 20 | Summer 2020

On this episode, we showcase the following four poets out of dozens who took the stage during “Cruzando Fronteras”—an event on immigration and border crossing—to share their personal stories: Alondra Adame, Eva Gonzalez, Gustavo Martir, and Diana Castellanos. Then, Julián Esteban Torres López shares his keynote speech, which tackled the role of storytelling as a tool of empowerment that can disrupt the status quo, confront caricatures, change politics by first changing culture, and help shape new paradigms. […]

J. Daniel Cruz recounts his story as a gay Mexican immigrant in the United States in his journey through acceptance, love, loss, and family ties. Cruz explores the religious, social, and familial struggles that arise when a family member identifies as LGBTQ. […]

In the years before my grandmother’s death, she became the enthusiastic genealogist of our family, piecing together tales so extraordinary I can sometimes hardly believe they recount the genesis of our family. Now, after my grandmother’s death, I feel my tenuous grasp on my heritage slipping, so I revisit her expansive research and discover the complexities of my heritage are so much more astonishing than I could anticipate. […]

“Imagine my hill at the edge of a road. Imagine a city, Kinshasa, a recent Belgian colony made independent nine years earlier. Imagine my white Belgian father, an architect waiting to make deals with one of the cruelest dictators of our times: Mobutu Sesseseko. Imagine my metisse mother, born as a simple brown girl in Burundi, now the queen of the continent, thanks to papa. Imagine me, a four-year-old brown girl, waiting for the sun to set to sneak out of the house to my castle at the end of a road, on the side of a hill.” […]

“Beach Speak” focuses on Angelica Julia Davila’s identity as Latinx through the use of the Spanish and English languages. Documenting her struggle with both languages while a child, Angelica explores what it means to accept who one is on the inside. It is a piece that touches on the shame of being seen as different while growing up in the United States. […]

This story is about food. And identity. And how each feeds the other. In a series of vignettes and reflections on Hana Etsuko Dethlefsen’s relationship with family, culture, food, and recipes, she explores the bitter-sweetness of an identity that is defined by being in-between. […]

My mom was an immigrant for eighteen months. I have been an immigrant for twenty-seven years. What made our migrations different? Mom was borderline illiterate, had six children and chose a husband poorly. I earned a Ph.D., had only one child, married a good man, divorced him, and married a better one. I teach at a university where I’m surrounded by intelligent people with inquisitive minds. I don’t know if education was the key, or who we married, or fate. […]

“When My Name is José” is a playful take on when and how often someone’s gotten Juan Carlos Reyes’s name wrong since he was a kid. The concerns are local and universal: navigating a new culture, assimilation, and the politics of speaking up. […]

You waited until now to tell me I was the love of your life? More than 2 decades after we met—as we’re pushing 50? Timing has clearly never been our strong suit. Over and over again we find each other. We take turns rushing toward each other like a wave hitting the shore, only to pull away once again. I wouldn’t call you my other half, but no one else is my hafu. […]

Using the format of a pop culture quiz, Yolande House interrogates her sexuality and how it has—or hasn’t—changed as she’s grown older. Is sexuality based on experience or identity? Does her lack of recent experience negate a strong identity that formed when she was younger? House’s essay gives a clear voice to the frustrations of how the world looks at bisexuals compared to how bi+ people feel about themselves. […]

A ride home from the nice guy at the bar transforms into being dragged into a bedroom, and the narrator struggles with her second experience of sexual assault. […]

In this in-depth interview with Yaldaz Sadakova—creator of Foreignish.net and author of The Wrong Passport: Memoir Stories About Immigration—we unpack the dreaded question “Where are you from?”, its limitations, how it’s a micro-aggression, and a better question to ask; Yaldaz speaks to how she found new emotional and intellectual anchors after leaving her birth country and how she found her creative voice in a foreign land; her feelings of shame and distress about forgetting her mother tongue; becoming estranged from her Turkish Muslim heritage; we interrogate our hesitation to correct people when they mispronounce our names; she elaborates as to why she’s convinced borders are a form of injustice; and much more. […]

“Bureaucracy is colonization’s filing system; at Ellis and Angel island where people were renamed with ‘American’ names, at the border where children are being separated from their families, and thus their namesakes, a brutality perfected in Native Boarding Schools. Over the centuries of the Transatlantic slave trade, cultures, names and entire lineages were stripped from the people in a brutalist gesture to weaken identity. That is why we insist on our complication, our trickiness, reminding the systems that we are multitudes,” Ana Reyes-Bonar. […]

“All My Safe Spaces Are Dead” is a look at the upheaval and restructuring of my sense of self. My sense of safety is a horizon I never seem to reach; a mirage that morphs into something new once I tear my gaze away from its lies. Yet I wake up every morning looking for it, craving it, being unable to live without it. This is my hunt for a place to call home. […]