Growing up in Chicago and then up and down neighborhoods and colonias in different cities in the Rio Grande Valley, spending my teens in Mexico, I was exposed to the diverse histories that form the foundation of my identity.

These experiences have deeply influenced my creative practice – it’s inevitable that they shape my identity and the narratives I craft. All these places reside within me, and I am an integral part of them. My roots spread far and wide, as I dwell in these B/borderlands, while also firmly rooted in the ancestral lands of my parents, the ranchos in Mexico and the mountains in Puerto Rico.

My purpose has always been to leave a note to those that erase me, ‘I was here,’ without stifling my raw emotions (there is that trace of my youthful idealism shaped by punk and zine culture). Writing for those who embody resilience and spirit is a labor of passion. It’s about documenting that someone like me exists, that we have always existed, making our mark and ensuring our stories are told.

For the single mami Chicana/Boricua, the queer welfare mami, the crip body living in multiple spaces, the vegan earth mami raised on government aid, and the high school dropout who sought something, anything, in the vast universe of books despite her father’s warning – all these identities have shaped and molded my writings. As a teenager, a high school dropout navigating a learning disability and varying levels of poverty, I found comfort and a sense of purpose in the random end-to-end reading of library shelves.

I didn’t know exactly what I was searching for, but I knew there had to be answers out there – reasons for why I was the way I was, and why society functioned as it did. The transformative thinking came later, with the influential words of radical women of color zinesters. Their perspectives fundamentally changed the way I see education and community, rooting my work in the soil of revolutionary love. My words extend far beyond their literary form.

Uncontained by the definitions of literary form or the unfamiliar realm of academia, they circle back to a fundamental intent: to critique, heal, possibly create change, but always to document.