Weare getting there. Well, it is like v peoplere realizing we can't really do without it, so we have to figure out what we mean when we say it in this world, right?

And you know, you brought up humming bird's daughter. Just imagine 20 years studying with shamans and medicine people to write that book. So i've become, you know, i used to work with baptist missionaries. They're not sure what kind of beast i am now they don't know if i'm in league with satan or not, because i've got a very strange view. But i i find the sacred in almost everything. So

i think that's. Em,

not unconnected too, something ursuliloguin said,

ha ha ham, who

was a teacher to you, and

she was my discoverer, your discoverer. She started my career.

She you, you you report. This was something she said. Em, i believe, in a class, we writers are the wraw nerve of the universe. Our job is to go out and feel things for people, then to come back and tell them how it feels to be alive, because they are numb because we have forgotten. And i feel like that. Er, you know, you go out to feel things about the boundaries between ans and the boarders we we build between ourselves, specifically the us. Mexican border, and and, and the back. And the fourth of it really has been there all the way through your life as well as your writing. Um, so, as you said, you moved to the u yu. Your bornan e to ant t joanno. You moved to the us. At a young age. You're finishing college on this side of the border. And then in the ofyour graduation, when your father was on a trip on the other side of the border, he was killed. Um, do you want yo, notice y. You want to say anything about thatiye. There.

The journey was really interesting for me, because i thought i was just like everybody, just like i think you're all just like me. So when i meet you, i think, ohe you've got a mexican grandma. You all speak spanish. You used to eat peanut butter on a hot corn tortilla, just like me. And you didn't. But in some ways, we all are the same, because we all have family and history and memories and so forth. And er. So i would spend my boyhood going back and forth across the erand at the end of fourth grade, there was an outbreak of street violence. Somebody wanted to hurt me in particular. And my parents thought, we're going to get out of here and move to my mam's people. Go up to a white neighborhood, an anglo neighborhood. And to my mother's undying, i think, shock and chagrin, we were seen as the invading mexican family. I this neighbourhood. And she was like, a dear boy, i am from new york city, don now, my family are from virginia, but that didn't she was tainted by our existence, which was shocking to all of us. And i had learned spanish before i learned english, s i had an accent, and it was at that point when people started calling me racial names, which was a great shock. So that transformation hit hard and fast. I went to college. Id was the first to go to college in my family, because my parents pushed me, and thank goodness for that. And in my senior year, being my father's first child, he had, i had other my dad was a traditional mexican man, you know, he had families, um. But i was the only one in this family. And since i was the first, he wanted to get me a graduation gift. And so he drove into his home town, which is the model for tresca marones, to real town, corosario, sinaloa, 27 hours, and he retrieved money forme as a graduation gift, and he drove back 27 hours and was caught by bad mexican copse, and he died. And a, it was not, it was not good. And a, then they wouldn't let me bury him. They made me buy him. I was 20 years old, not ready. So i bought my debt, and that ended everything for us. We were completely destitute. My brothers and i took up a collection to bury him. We buried him in an unmarked grave in tiana, um. But then, you know, in steps legwyn who, i had written a story about that, and she took me in when she read it, and she published it. Was my first sale. So in some ways, that sacrifice blanched everything.