Longing is the price of distance/travel/migration…the bicultural life.   You can’t dissipate it, but you can channel it.
Isabel Allende writes in the introduction to her book Mi Pais Inventado that she writes “as a …

…it’s not just about Jaime Camil (pictured left, in green, though he is reason enough).
I came to my telenovela-watching late in life.  When I lived in Madrid, we had literally 5 channels and I was …

On the shelf in my studio is This Tree Is Older Than Your Are: A Bilingual Gathering of Stories and Poems from Mexico. I’ve read a handful of its poems to my kids; I used …

Over the last month or so, I’ve been laboring away on a project that I consider muy Americano: a backyard garden.
Por supuesto, I know growing a garden is by no means exclusively American (among others, …

Conoces el agotamiento.  The dulling of your senses, the heaviness of your  párpados, the inability to focus. 
Let yourself go demasiado, and you’ll start to misremember language, too.  Say “pulpo” when you really mean “paraguas.” …

My kids have a multicolored plush spider that, if you press one of its dangly dance-shoed legs, plays the Lambada. A Spanish-speaking friend of my mother’s got it for our older daughter. I remember how, …

Conoces esta costumbre?  Milagros are an ancient aspect of Latin folk culture: small silver or gold votive offerings that look like charm bracelet charms and come in so many shapes.  Even if obscured by tiempo …

What if everything you’d been taught about home was not enough? What if it were not just the ciudad or pais you were born in, grew up in? Where you buried your treasures, your dead? …

A veces el pulpo es malo, otras veces es bueno.  When I ask my daughter about him se ve espantada, telling me that he’s outside, on the terrace, wanting to bite her, or looks past …

I am stereotypically Latina in few things, but one of the stereotypes that does fit is that of the temper.   In my heart, I see little wrong with raising my voice, unleashing a long …