Straddling Borders
Existing in two worlds can complicate your identity and complete it–whether it’s understanding your medicine man grandfather, to deepening the concept of love through a different tongue, these storytellers takes us around the world from Colombia to Papua New Guinea, seeking definition and connections with presumably different cultures. Featuring: Francis Rojas Jeremiah Barber William Guillermo Ortiz, Curandero / Medicine Man...
The Border: thoughts on place and identity
“There was a wall…Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed I have been thinking a lot about borders. The borders I know come to being at the airport—at the security line where my belongings and body are scanned, at the booths of the immigration officers who take my fingerprints, my picture, my...
Ingrid Rojas Contreras searches for the forgotten magic in immigrant stories
For all thirteen years as an immigrant I have collected answers to this question: When you traveled over what special item did you bring? A poetry book. A dress. A father’s bow tie. I used to ask this more when I lived in Chicago, where I often found myself in the wee hours of the night waiting for the owl bus, huddling with strangers under the shelter of one heat lamp. I remember a young Mexican bartender who told me a flag and a...
