Other Writing

“Day of the Dead Is Every Day”

Houston Chronicle | October 30, 2022

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In the United States, grief is often treated like a phase, a temporary state that one needs only to pass through and come out on the other side to move forward. When my mother died, I kept waiting for the grief to go away. It does ease; its sharp edges smooth. But I carry it each day. Communities like ours, traditions like these, demonstrate to us all how crucial it is to work with—not against—death. To find joy and comfort in it. Annual events are only the beginning; adhering to the rituals fully is just the start. For many of us, finding ways to commemorate the dead is a year-long practice, and we are working at it.

I have never brought a candle to a cemetery on Undas.

I have never built an ofrenda.

There are so many graves these days. …

“Tell Me If You’ve Heard This One”

Hindsight | issue 2 | 2021

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Squid said the couches should go first and they listened, because he was a professional, because he’d been doing this moving thing the whole year since he’d retired from the Border Patrol. Three of them—Joe, Mac, and Frank V.—took the sectional in the living room. They separated each piece, bundling first the left-arm chaise and corner square, then the right-arm section in the special plastic Squid had brought to protect the Gutierrezes’ furniture from more scuffs and the general Brownsville humidity…

“We Were Known For Our Rivers”

Texas Highways | June 27, 2023

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But most people who knew my home knew us by our rivers. The Nueces, Frio, Sabinal, all minutes away from town, are three of our most popular and striking in their spring-fed glory. They are as changeable as Texas weather. They can move from swift currents and shallow, rocky runs to dark, deep swimming holes flanked by trees and cliffs. We would go there on hot days. We would rent cabins for graduations and anniversaries, or to take out-of-towners. We knew—and still know—the spots and crossings just for us locals, where four-wheel drive is best, where a drive or a walk along the shifting rocks may be necessary in our blistering summers to find those pools of water tucked away. Fourteen months ago, you may have heard of us for a variety of reasons, or you may not have heard of us at all.

I am from Uvalde.

We were known for our rivers once. …

“7 Books Featuring a Chorus of Voices of Color”

Electric Lit | August 23, 2022

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Narrative of community makes room for people connected by concepts other than place. Communities like my Filipino and Tejano families, whose connections exist beyond location; or those whose bonds to a place have been disrupted by colonialism or slavery or migration or disaster. What literary form can better depict the ties that bind communities like ours? A single narrator, even an omniscient third-person voice, shows only one fractal of the larger image, or it keeps us at a distance. But individual stories woven and layered—we see the whole picture, we can live within them all. A novel in many voices can show not just a place but a culture, not just a shared setting but a shared history and identity and blood. We can pass down individual tales while also telling a greater one. …

“Not Eagle, Not Star”

Contra Viento | issue 3 | 2020

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The thing about you, your father likes to say, is that you’re dumber than the barnacles on a whale’s ass. Which shouldn’t hurt when you think about it, because he knows as well as you this is Eagle Pass, two hundred fifty miles away from the closest ocean which is a murky saltwater gulf where there are no whales just as here there are no eagles, no passes. You could remind him you both belong to the river — its copperhead heft snaking between the mesquites just behind you, in this casino parking lot on the Kickapoo Tribe Reservation…

“Wildcatters and Hell-Raisers: On Being a Writer From Texas”

Literary Hub | August 10, 2022

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When I read those books years ago, I pored through them in search of the familiar. These were award-winning, world-famous novels about my home; surely I could find something relatable. And I did. Mentions here and there of towns, highways, waterways I recognized, accents or phrases or rituals I knew. But none fully captured my understanding of Texas. I was a young writer and a Texan dreaming big dreams about publishing around the world, and it discouraged me. We have been told and re-told the world over; what more could be said? Another book set here would simply be a small voice shouting within the roar of a crowd—a crowd with multiple Pulitzers.

Is there room for me in all this? I wanted to ask. I am here, we are here, can’t we be Texas, too?…

“The Queens of Santo Niño”

Copper Nickel | issue 29 | 2019

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Our voices—in song or in gossip—echo into every corner of the Catholic church on Broadway and 13th, which had been quiet before we arrived. We do very little quietly. And yet we quiet when Maharlika Castillo enters the church. We turn to watch. She has that effect. She strides into Sacred Heart purposefully, with her daughter—Carly, is that her name? Yes.—by the hand…

“The Seedy Corner”

DIAGRAM | issue 19.4 | 2019

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The house in Galveston, in Fish Village, on Albacore Avenue specifically, is no longer yellow but I will always think of it so: a pale milky yellow, like I imagine cream with a pat of butter stirred in to be—but that sounds so Midwestern, doesn’t it, that cream and butter shit, and apart from one trip to Wisconsin and a friendship with some Minnesotans I know fuck all about the Midwest—so instead let’s say it is a golden-white like sunlight, why don’t we, the scorching sunlight of the Texas coast that I know well…

“The Queen Signal”

Creative Nonfiction | issue 67 | 2018

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He mentions how, the first time they saw the bees, he swatted at them, and Mom scolded him for it.

We laugh. She didn’t mind creeping things, not the way Lindsay and I do, flailing and squealing dramatically when they enter our orbit. She was the one who crushed scorpions on the kitchen floor with little fanfare, or pretended to pluck wolf spiders from the wall and throw them at us as we shrieked and she cackled. She had strong feet, callused from a lifetime of walking barefoot—on our tiled floor, our stubby grass, and before that the hot, damp gravel of Galveston, and before even that the provinces of Mindoro, the island in the Philippines where she was born…

“Red Zone”

TriQuarterly | issue 152 | 2017

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Please rise for the national anthem. I love this moment, when the show starts, when the lights don’t dim but brighten. Two flags ripple in the breeze—warm even at night because this is the Valley—and we stand as one. Even me, mojada that I am. Every game I sing the words; they are sweeter to me because they are stolen.

Play ball.

They spread into their positions, as choreographed as the tentacles of a firework. Jessica watches Andrew M. warming up in the hot corner. Bee-short-for-Beatrice keeps her eyes on Valentin, in left field. Anita, Jose at catcher, and so on. Even our gazes belong to them. Mine belongs to the mound. Or, more accurately, to the starter on the mound tonight, the long-legged one who is currently punching the toes of his cleats into the dirt as if staking a claim…