The U.S. Has a Legal Responsibility to Those Seeking Refuge | New York Times Opinion

In 1990, my parents moved to the United States from Mexico so that my father could get his Ph.D. in business. By the time he had successfully completed his studies, they had welcomed two children, and a third was on the way. In the years that followed, my parents built their version of the American dream. They bought a house, where they planted a garden and hosted Thanksgivings and birthday parties, until they sent us off to colleges to pursue our own version of the American dream. Read more.

Acts of Translation | Christian Century

We often talk about a particular translation as “doing justice” to a text. By that, we mean that it expresses it fully—that whatever heights of prose or sleights of hand the author concocted in the original language, the translator managed to do the same, backward and in heels. When a translation is “just,” it has seen and considered and transmitted into a new language all of the facets and possibilities inherent in a text. Read more.

At the border, no one can know your name | Zora Mag

“Just after climbing down a maze of concrete ramps that looked like a diagram of Dante’s Hell, past a security guard with an AK-47 strapped to his front who spent his mornings texting, I’d exit the turnstile and into a plaza with waiting taxis and 10-foot-high letters that said: MEXICO TIJUANA.” Read more.

best american travel writing 2020.

Walking Into the River | Electric Literature

“As the caravan of immigrants crossed the Usumacinta river that marks the border between Guatemala and Mexico, a Mexican police helicopter used the downdraft from its rotors to make waves rise on the river, to make the passage harder for the people walking North, away from violence. From his bird’s eye view, the people on either side of the water must have seemed like ants to the pilot, barely people.” An essay on Virginia Woolf, bodies (of water) and finding our shared humanity. Read more.

2020 Pushcart prize nominee.

How Translating Annie Dillard Helps Me Attend to a Dying World | Catapult

Annie Dillard’s account of a year spent carefully observing the world around her cabin in the Virginia backwoods, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was published in 1974. Nearly a decade earlier, a report from the President’s Science Advisory Council warned that burning fossil fuels “may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” by the year 2000. Read more.

The Threshold | Patagonia

Maybe you are standing in a doorway, bouncing on the tips of your toes. Maybe it is the threshold between your life as it has been—to some extent comfortable or easy or thoughtless—and the life you might have if you lived and ate and saw and felt things with the knowledge that the world is in the middle of irrevocable, likely catastrophic climate change, amidst a dozen other types of catastrophic, irrevocable changes, and it is up to us, more or less, how catastrophic that change is. Read more.