My interview in Contra Viento Journal was published today. Thank you Gabriel Dozal and Sean McCoy.
"I also think growing up dirt poor on the border had a profound effect on me. My neighborhood in Ysleta hasn’t changed too much: it’s become working-class, when it was actually poorer in the ’60s and ’70s. Not even working class. I believe, and have always believed, in los de abajo, the very poor, and what they have to contribute, the ideas they explore, the importance of their lives, even if so many others just ignore them. If that’s empathy, then I wholeheartedly embrace it. But even that word, ‘empathy,’ seems studied somehow: these are just the people I knew, the people I grew up with, my people."
