Prose Coming into Fighting new life quarterly, issue five, 11/11/19What did it mean to be a Latinx person from Idaho, and how different could it be from growing up in California, a place where, not only are Latinx people the majority, but also make up a significant percentage of the state legislators? How did growing up in a place where I wasn’t the minority affect me? A Film About Bleeding, Composed of Previously Discarded Fragments sfmoma open space, 10/3/2018My friend is standing in front of her wardrobe. I am trying to make a film about her for a school project. So far, I have: still black-and-white film photographs I took of her at the beach in Alameda; a sixty-minute recording of our conversation on tape; a video on my phone of her doing a perfect cartwheel, parallel to the surf. Which is to say, not much. Más sencilla y más sincera, or: aquí es todo diferente, todo, todo es diferente. sfmoma open space, 11/28/2018Earlier this year, in the spring, I accompanied my mother to Tijuana. She had announced to my sister and I that what she wanted for Mother’s Day was to go to the border and distribute care packages to members of the caravan. A People's History of Trash: On Rejecting Anti-Blackness In the Most Racist City You've Ever Lived In sfmoma open space, 9/5/2018Perhaps you know what I affectionately refer to as trash as the precariat: that portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat.” Or as the lumpen, the disregarded (ahem!) class whose potential was overlooked by earlier revolutions, but recognized by the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. In short: trash is a political position of abject disenfranchisement, who’s not here to make the neoliberal phoenix look good. Letter From A Virgin Who Can't Drive sfmoma open space, 10/31/2018Until I was eighteen, I was told a humorous story about my birth, one that I desperately wish was true: that my mother, in complete denial that she was in labor, drove herself from Huntington Park, stopped at Tommy Burger on Florence for a side of pickled yellow chilis and the Arco on Soto for gas, then continued on to — as we say in my family — la Casa de las Siete Chingadas. not only a woman, but wicked: notes on the divine new life quarterly, 4/27/2018it has always troubled me that i’ve found the allure of the structural divine so illusive. not the allure, i mean the ecstasy. but it’s also the ability to stay still, imitate a gesture, the rhythm of which to chant a sutra, remember which knee to bend, or which hand to use. ecstasy i seem to find in places generally found to be devoid of spiritual charm or absent of god.