It doesn’t matter how we define family—we each have our own perspectives, experiences, and expectations of what it means. The work on this issue reminds us that family can take many forms.

my grandparents are my world

Ama & Mio, nicknames for each of them. 

in Spanish Ama means “to love” & Mio means “mine” —they swaddle me with comida & warmth

My mother loves sunflowers. 

And during our one-year stint in West Texas, she planted a bunch in the back corner of our yard. 

We lived in a lonely neighborhood on the edge of town and I think my mother wanted a bit of color. 

Growing up deep in the heart of darkness, where the stars at night shine big and bright like the flashlight she used to read under her colcha,

she never imagined going to college or even getting a high school degree; mama encouraged her instead to marry young and start a family

My relationship with my dad was strained leading up to this moment. We were too similar and headstrong — we both had much growing up to do. That all dissolved when I saw him lying on the hospital bed. It did not escape me that out of the swirl of emotions that I felt from nearly losing him to a reckless driver, one feeling continued to float to the top: rage.

Humans start forming memories when they are 2 to 2½ years old, child development researchers currently tell us. But what of children whose ancestors whisper to them in the low light? Stories of generations of genes mixed to make them.

Mami you are magic, a curandera healing all doubt and illness, a touch of your hands as medicinal as the earth, as if every ancestor is cupped within them, the comfort of our abuelas, Tia’s, cihuah vibrating through you.

When my father came to this country, he knew little “proper” English. He met and fell in love with my mother, who taught him how to read with her high school textbooks. (That’s some cute shit, right? Right out of a Romantic Comedy that will never get made.) He would meet up with her after school and they would sit under a tree and read together.