Many poems in my book CATRACHOS take place in Miami. This is a book about growing up in Miami. But while Miami gets depicted as a city of fun and pleasure, for me it was a place of hand-me-down conservatism, where POCs were pitted against one another. I’ll never forget that.

This is the reason why the film MOONLIGHT struck such a chord with me. My memories of Miami, which I left again in my late-20s, are about housing projects, gangs, toxic masculinity, prejudice, Americanization, and other baggage. As a Central American, I was othered by the other.

Other Latinxs of my generation, also raised in Miami, don’t speak or write Spanish because I remember how much their parents preached in their households that English was the only way to adapt to the American system. My mother taught me the opposite: I couldn’t forget Spanish.

You’ll come across many of those contradictions in CATRACHOS. But I’m not done writing about them and do foresee tackling more of them, perhaps, in poetry or a memoir. I am fascinated by how this book will be embraced or rejected by literary audiences in Miami. But I’m not done.