I was up in the plum tree when I saw him climbing over the piles of trash—plywood with rusted nails jutting out at weird angles, tires and license plates, bushes that pushed through all that trash.

What does belonging to a place mean when you’re Mexican American? Emilly Prado explores what it means to exist between two worlds.

The guy I’m dating in Ann Arbor is The One-Eyed Bat! He wrestles with a mask over one eye. He’s from a Mayflower family in Massachusetts, and he goes to Mexico to wrestle Lucha Libre-style. He jumps...

I applied for a job at Hooters on a dare a few weeks before my nineteenth birthday. A shoe salesman who worked across from me at the mall told me he’d pay me twenty dollars to apply.

Aguilar, the photographer and chronicler of brown life who centered lesbians and her own corpulent body, passed away in April in Southern California. Her death from complications from diabetes was …

First of all, me too.

Who are we if not kin through our deviations? Street hustler and femme queen, macho and maricóncito, variations on a chulo aesthetic.

Last year, I attended a yoga retreat for my birthday in which I took a yoga and meditation workshop at the Ananda Meditation Retreat center. On the train to Nevada City, I contemplated what my...

WE BEAT ALVAREZ BY EIGHT POINTS. Some of our JV wrestlers walk with their families towards the exit like they don’t have to help clean up.

I go to the eyebrow artist, because no one else can give me what I crave: Chris Pine’s sculpted brows. Beautiful, perfect. Thick enough to hold a smear of peanut butter, if I wanted. Sarah told me...

When I say I am not like other gay men, I mean I am not like this man. I am not loose. I don’t just let things happen. But still I want to take him in my arms and kiss him on the cheek. If I am not…

One writer explores the sensitive threads that Odd Future plucked as he navigated sexuality, blackness, mental health, and his own sense of belonging.

Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Elisa Gonzalez for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.

CW: abuse When you ask me how I’d write about you, it keeps emerging, like tarot. The sun, the sun, the sun. ~ When our friendship evolves from its nascent stages, we’re riding the COTA from downtown...

you have trouble saying your name and you say it anyway

Arlene was only a year older and thought everything was out of date. She cut up pillowcases and sewed them into dresses. She said, Hurry up , and I followed. Sixteen and seventeen: We knew the...

Carina del Valle Schorske traces a lineage of Puerto Rican backup dancers in American entertainment from Rita Moreno to JLo.

“Alzheimer’s had been pickpocketing her of a few memories each day until finally I was just a voice she couldn’t place.”

I told people I was Mexican because it was easier. They’d never heard of El Salvador, and there was no way of explaining what it meant to be from the smallest country in Central America, the small...

We will be lying on our white leather sofa, watching TV. You’ll be nestled underneath […]

In 1996, you couldn’t walk two blocks in Morningside Heights without hearing rap or hip-hop. It was the heyday of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, the summer of “California Love.” Of the three CDs I owned—along...

_________ Joel Salcido was born in the San Fernando Valley & raised in West Phoenix. He is the son of Mexican immigrants, a first-generation college graduate, a husband, & father of three sons. Joel...

When you have family in both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, how do you experience the border?