To Never Have Risked Our Lives: A Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing

The offer to help document a shared existence that transcends geographic, physical, and spiritual borders felt like a call to action—an opportunity to lift voices, or rather to allow the stories we tell about ourselves to shine brighter. . . . As you will read in these narratives and hear in these interviews, we are never in the margins of our own stories. —Jennifer De Leon
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Influences from Latin American culture are still present in my family, and we find ways to reconnect with the Mexican part of our identity. . . . This portfolio is, among other things, a way for people like me to better understand the system of diaspora that led our families to move to new countries and form new cultures. —Ben Black
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While there are pieces centered on cultural loss (the fact that the portfolio was almost entirely written in English is evidence of this), there is a reclamation of identity that takes readers beyond the U.S.–Mexico border and into the mercurial neighborhoods of El Salvador, the mythological underworld of the Aztecs, and the uncertain school grounds of a Panamanian landscape as lush as it is volatile. —Esteban Rodríguez

Read the full introduction