My mother couldn’t read or write, she washed dishes and cleaned rooms and everything. I try to live my life as if every single person is important, which I believe is [true], knowing, of course, people might say wonderful things about you today, but tomorrow it might be a different story. I’m always aware of that.
Boko Haram has claimed responsibility and said they intend to sell the girls (into sex slavery) yet there are people within Nigeria who doubt the veracity of the abduction, who claim that this is just opposition politicians trying to destabilize Jonathan's government, who claim that the women crying for their abducted daughters were hired to do so. The mind boggles!.
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.
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