An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
My mother saw the border as a metaphor for possibility. To her, the border wasn’t geography, but poetry. Sometimes the border is a crisscrossing, with some children born here and others born there. Not a river, but a poem filled with words waiting to be written down. A brave new music.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
My father was not so different than Gerty. He was a King Ranch man through and through. He spoke English and Spanish as one language, making one body of words from the branchy rivers of South Texas.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
San Antonio is the patron saint of lost causes, and Rolando created a statue of him in faux-marble white with the Alamo perched like a hat, except that the saint is upside down, so the Alamo is at his feet. When you want something, Rolando says, you flip the statue upside down.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Willie grew up right here, on the Westside, el Hueso. The bone of San Antonio. We call it the barrio.
Lately, people have been getting these letters, and they bring them to me. I don’t know why, only that Willie died 30 years ago this year, 2018. Something about he’s stepping up, moving on, and now he’s finding himself. Not lost anymore, no way. Has things he wants to get off his chest. Knows the way home to you now.
This is his story.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Because of her story, I’ve seen the way that wars secure land at the cost of great violence, hate, and marginalization. Sometimes the so-called losers win. Like the Alamo that the Mexicans won, whose descendants lost everything. What about the downtown real estate? Mary Lou doesn’t know what happened to it. Apparently, not all heroes die rich.
