Guatemalan Light

“I realize now that the light of these Guatemalan memories has never left me. The light of Guatemalan dusk, of its incandescent bulbs. A bit of this village, a place I really knew very little about, was always with me during the long, solitary years of my boyhood in Los Angeles… The Eden glow of Guatemala has stayed with me, decade after decade; I’ve never stopped feeling its warmth, and I never stopped believing that my family began in a place where rivers flowed and steam trains ran on steel rails. The Guatemalan light in my memory made me stronger and gave me a sense of my place in the world.”

— Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”