The stories were all set in my hometown, so every assignment I turned in to my fiction teacher was about a world-an experience-neither she nor my classmates knew anything about.“You have a wild imagination,” my teacher said of my story about a flood that devastated the whole neighborhood, forcing the people to spend a week on their roofs, navigating makeshift canoes to retrieve the floating bodies of their dogs, cats, and chickens.“Your work is over-the-top and overwritten,” my teacher said of my story about a young girl who was forced to go to school barefoot because her family was too poor to buy her shoes. I had gotten the funding, gone on my trip to Mexico, and though the money was given to me with no strings attached, I felt an obligation to follow through on what I had said I would do. The ten days I spent in Iguala had inspired me to write that story collection I claimed I was writing to get the grant from Kresge College. I had to remember each of them, write their stories, share their pain, so that they knew they weren’t alone. It was by writing about the people I knew, describing their plight, that I could honor their difficult experiences and keep them in my heart and mind. My visit to Mexico over Christmas, though painful, had once again reinforced my need to write about the place of my birth. To my disappointment, I was the only Latina in my advanced fiction class. W hen the new year arrived, I started my second quarter at UC Santa Cruz. This excerpt was published in Poets & Dreamers.
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