Categoría: Inglés

Early Morning Shift 

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Translated by Marvin Najarro She takes the avocado from her lunch box and cuts in half, takes out the bag where she has the toritllas that she had wrapped in aluminum foil, and then removes the lid from the plastic food container where she has fried beans and three boiled eggs. Wrapped in a napkin is a fistful of salt and a jalapeño pepper. She has coffee in the thermos bottle. It is mealtime.  Calandria Guadalupe, began working at age five, making comales from clay in the village of Santa Maria Magdalena Tiltipec, Santos Reyes Nopala, Oaxaca, Mexico, she was the fifth of twelve…

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Light Through The Window

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Translated by Katrina Hassan He draws the curtain and opens the blinds, sunbeams criss-cross the dust in the room. Marcelino lives in an old derelict building. The owners never fix anything because they rent it out to undocumented Latin American migrants. This being the reason why they’ve never done the required upgrades. The more he cleans, the more the dust builds up, like roaches or ants. Marcelino rents a studio apartment. It’s a small room where he has a stove, a small fridge, and a small bathroom. He barely has any room to move. After 12 years of living in…

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The Return of Silverio 

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Translated by Marvin Najarro Silverio was two years old when his father immigrated to the United States as an undocumented immigrant, his sisters Bartola and Chucita were three and four years old. For a long time, they only knew his voice through the phone calls he used to make on weekends, and the two pictures their mother had next to him; there were no family pictures.  By the time technology arrived in their native Lelá Chancó, Camotán, Chiquimula, Guatemala, they did not have money to buy a cell phone to make video calls, until their father who lived in Washington,…

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The Stilts of Cecilia 

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Translated by Marvin Najarro Cecilia never imagined that after working in a maquila in her native Puerto Lempira, Gracias a Dios, Honduras, she would end up painting houses in the United States. She did not land in a fast-food restaurant or in some maintenance job, but rather it was gardening and construction that awaited her.   Although women in her native country besides looking after their family are accustomed to perform tasks that by gender correspond to men, painting house ceilings on stilts was something new for her. When she emigrated, she was told that there was plenty of work in…

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Other Horizons 

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Translated by Katrina Hassan The alarm clock sounds off from afar, he checks the time, and it is three thirty a.m. He gets up, still sleepy, and walks towards the bathroom. He left a bucket full of water in the room the night before to save himself from going out on the patio to dispose of it. In a bag, he has four outfits. He takes one that he ironed the night before and gets dressed to wait on the bread delivery man that will arrive at any second now. On one of two hobs on the stove, he heats…

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