Tag: mexico
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Writing From the Classroom: Dana Gil, Ghost-Seer
This is an essay by Dana Gil, who took my class “Literature and Contemporary Issues.” She has a real knack for storytelling, and this story, well…something to tell around the campfire. My grandmother, María Elgega, died three weeks ago. She died in her sleep, at her nursing home, my mother at her side. She had…
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El Testimonio, capítulo 1: El Nacimiento del Pocho
¡El primer podcast en español! (But, like any Salvadoran party, everyone is welcome) Aquí hablo de la vida del pocho–que significa, una fruta podrida, y un Latino que no sabe nada de su cultura, que no habla español, que está lejos de sus raíces. Pero, este pocho decidió, en su juventud, meterse en la cultura salvadoreña para…
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Gracias, México, for Saving My Salvadoran Soul
Once my Uncle Paco–the pain-in-the-ass Salvadoran revolutionary in exile in Mexico–saw how much books meant to me, he backed off. After I shook the novel Cien años de soledad in his face and swore I’d read it until I understood it, I holed up in his guest bedroom and started on the first paragraph, with a…
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The Uncle Who Kicked My Salvadoran Ass
My great Uncle Paco was a pain in the ass. He had been all his life. In the 1930’s, he had joined with the Communist movement in El Salvador, during the rise of a dictator they called El Brujo, the Warlock. They had planned for an uprising of the poor against the corrupt and bloody…
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Mexico, My Mexico
The woman, in her fifties, had draped a black, webbed veil over her head. Her dress might have been from Sears, bought at a thrift store, but the scarf around her neck was from a thousand years of Nahuatl stitching. Her skin was Oaxacan-brown, with the native folds in her cheeks. She clenched her hands…