I believe that catcalling serves the double function of allowing the collective chauvinist culture to flex its muscles in the streets in order to keep women in a state of submission, and of allowing individual men to boost their egos by engaging in an activity that gives them a feeling of power.
Sometimes I look at my computer screen, at all of the words that I’ve written and all of those that have yet to show themselves to me, and I have the sense to think that I’m looking into a cracked mirror that I don’t quite comprehend.
"I had never forgotten it. Not only because of the shame and embarrassment of having an infamous "presentation” disaster, which thereafter became one of my greatest fears, but because it felt to me like an exemplification of my own failure as a Puerto Rican."
"I have felt within Venezuela throughout my entire life while spending all of my twenty outside of it. In an attempt to finally understand what happened to the beautiful country in my mother’s stories, I begin to ask questions and start memorizing her recipes."
The firefighters carried that extra baggage in their already twenty-plus-pound sacks on each and every trip. Their backpacks held their survival gear doubled in the weight of their historical heartaches, with their generational trauma in tow.
Some point down the line, an awareness manifested that I was not a part of the American ideal, or rather, that something bigger believed that I was not a part of the American ideal.
Twitter is the public’s preferred periodical of late. Yes, periodical—if Tom Wolfe championed a New Journalism of the ‘60s, then Twitter is our Newest Journalism.
We go way back, film and I. In some ways there’s been some sort of relationship between me and the silver screen from way before I was even born. It wasn’t always positive.