My Uncle Juan jokingly offered up an ingenious portmanteau to define our racially and culturally complex family: “We’re red Ricans,” he said, “—a mix of redneck and Puerto Rican.” In a way, this might be the most accurate description of my family’s blended cultural identity. As a woman of Puerto Rican descent who grew up in the Deep South, my work is woven from a multitude of different voices enriched by many different cultures. My father was the son of Alabama sharecroppers, and so that is a very different culture from the one my mother came from, but both shared a common experience of growing up poor in the South.

I think the hyphens and those borderlands and those perforated boundaries, are where I’m most at home. At one point in Dreaming in Cuban, I think that Pilar says something like she belongs “ . . . not here or there, but here AND there.” So I am straddling multiple worlds. and I think that’s where a lot of interesting energy happens and gets released, where languages and cultures collide and merge. I think it is also where reality and possibility meet, where a lot of interesting hybridity is going on.