This is a very loose collection of some shorter pieces I've written, mostly in classes. Most of my writing is in notebooks and I can't be bothered to transcribe it, so this page may look pretty empty. Rest assured that I've put out more than two pieces of prose in my life.
I'm a big perfectionist, and often look back on my work even more critically than I did when I first wrote it. I'll surely be tempted to delete things from this page, but I'm going to try not to. If it helps make things more exciting, you can treat each piece as a limited edition release regardless.
There is a contract, and I have broken it. It is a silent contract. I entered it, as have many before me, and I have muddied and torn it under my feet, as will many after. I will tell you how it happened.
Nine thousand five hundred feet.
Out of the mist of kid-memories comes the trail, dry and dusty from the feet of people and the hooves of horses. I know this trail, and I set off as it rises from the screaming valley floor over sagebrush moraines and along the sides of streams. It’s not good to drink from these streams without a filter, Dad tells me.
I must have been twelve or so when we hiked this trail. The mosquitos swarmed us as they crossed from one willowed side to the other, reveling in the warming pools of summer meltwater and in the little bays of the stream where the current flows in lazy circles. Phoebes and juncos, skilled singers and aerial acrobats, perched atop the willows and flew in calculated bursts after the bugs, always returning to their spot with something to show for their efforts. And all around rose the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, brush-covered and dry but full of vigor.
The landscape changes quickly here, though, and I’d have no time to get bored before being greeted by a whole new biome. Up from the valley rose sagebrush, up from the sagebrush rose willow, up from the willow rose pine, and so on forever towards the sky and further.
We set up our tent by a lake on this trip, and another, and another after. Dad swam in the snowmelt, and I dunked my head in, and the cold froze my blood and made my skull ache. I spent hours sitting on granite shores, reading, watching. Here would come another pack-laden hiker on the way to greater places, and I would look at her and say hello, and she would do the same. Sometimes horses came, sometimes a dog. There was the sound of birds in the pines, and of streams, and good shoes on dirt and dust.
On every trip I wrote my thoughts and sometimes punctuated these with a sketch of a leaf or a little bit of branch that I found interesting. These notes were mainly for myself, but of course I found myself looking to them whenever I was asked to write about a personal experience. I told my friends about the agile Junco and my teachers about the burning alkali dust and the cool granite lakes, for grades and for pleasure, and hazy tendrils lapped at my ankles.
I learned the history of this place I loved and wrote about it too. I drank books, swished the facts around in my mouth and spat out new stories of satire and humor and bile. I contributed to the great Old Western tradition of putting fact in the same dusty bed as fiction, and I took what resulted and put it to paper. I wrote more than a hundred pages of fiction that could have been fact, inspired by fact that could have been fiction. I revelled like the mosquitoes between the willows, and I bit and sucked at the blood of the mountains until it mixed with mine. I never tired.
But all of this was based on people. There were people who passed me on the trail, and who I passed in their towns in the valley. There were dogs and horses, too, to speak nothing of the flying bugs and the birds and the thick willows and young pines, the paintbrush and wooly mule-ears and the sagebrush, and cars in trailhead parking lots.
Eleven thousand seven hundred feet.
High above the world there is a mountain pass. Everything is empty here. Above, the sky is thin and bright blue. Ahead, a shallow pool stretches a little ways like the vestige of a scar on the high land. There is no life around the water. There are no willows. There are no ravenous mosquitos and there certainly are no juncos to catch them. The only sounds are those of the wind and my poles in the burning granite sand, and Dad walks beside me and looks at the peaks, which are much nearer now than ever before. I wouldn’t risk drinking from this water, says Dad.
A mule team passes us, laden with white canvas sacks. A man in a big hat, a man I’ve written about before, rides in front, and his yellow dog trots along at his heels. I know not to disturb the dog.
The man asks us where we’re headed. To such and such lake, Dad says, and then the mule team and its man and his dog are on their way again. Soon they are well out of eyeshot, and I am left with a profound sense of loneliness and isolation. I stand in awe of the starkness of my surroundings. I need nothing more, I think, as the long-lingering dust from the mules’ hooves dissipates.
I have written about this place too, in my private notebooks and in my essays. I have told my friends and my Mom about it, sometimes my teachers, and I have never hesitated to call it one of my favorite memories. There are few people here, few to see and few to talk about, and that is what makes it beautiful and all the harder to talk about.
But after this I still wrote about the land and its people. Fact continued to melt with fiction, I swished my experiences around and mixed them with my books and all that bile and sardonicism, and spent days writing it all down to profess my love for the mountains and their starkness and their characters. I brought to life No-Toes Walker (false), and the Indian desert trade routes (true), and the Singaporean Expeditions (unclear). I wove more colorful characters who swore and spoke funny. At many points, I fully departed from the sense of starkness that I’d admired so much, and entered fully the realm of invention.
All the while I continued to write about the willows and the juncos and the mosquitos. I told my teachers the things that had happened, and how I felt when I saw the screaming valley and the sagebrush sea. I got As, and praise from my parents and friends, and the mist rose and came up to my waist so that I could not remember the coldness of the water when I first dunked my head, or the sharpness of the granite on my palms. I forgot, and became hazy, and I told more people-stories.
Twelve thousand feet.
There is a contract, and I am breaking it. It is a silent contract. It is a contract with the rocks and the snowfields and the moraines, with the mountain passes and with their scars. It is a contract with the warbling junco as it lands on your shoulder when you’ve been crying, lost, and it is a contract with the mosquito that sucks your life as you suck the life of your second home. You sign it when you see the sunbleached bones of the fallen sheep and when you dip your aching blistered feet into the freezing mirror. You sign it with the blood of arteries which flow free with the smell of wildflowers, and you sign it with your squinting eyes atop marmot-tracked fields of summer snow.
I have told my friends and my teachers all about the things I have seen, and, in doing so, made it so that the places only I know are places that everyone knows. There were once many secrets between the mountain and I, and I told many.
I will tell you no more.
Growing up in a bilingual household, I learned very early on that every language has its limits. The Spanish verb “apapachar,” for example, has no English translation. Loosely, it means to hug or embrace not just with the arms, but with the soul. During injury or grief, my parents wouldn’t give me a hug, but an “apapacho”. We grafted the word into English as well, cumbersomely using it amid English words to bring more meaning to a phrase.
As I spent more time out of the house, though, my Spanish skills waned. I stopped injecting Spanish words into English. Instead, I did the opposite, so that the rare Spanish conversations I had were half-composed of grafts from English. Words were no longer exchanged to find more meaning. Grafting became a forced practice, spurred by my shrinking ability to speak Spanish. By seventh grade, I had started avoiding conversation with my Mexican family out of fear of misspeaking or having to graft. I was much more confident in my English skills, which had continually improved through school and daily life. Even in my fluent English, though, it was easy to feel limited by language. For all my education and interest, I still didn’t know how to describe the feeling of backpacking over a pass, or of watching the sun set through a bus window. I couldn’t find the right word regardless of which language I spoke.
The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi writes that “words exist because of meaning,” asking, “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” This is, of course, meant playfully, but Zhuangzi’s point demands attention. How can we deal with the frustration of never having the right word and requiring language all the same?
The answer, at least for me, lies in conlangs, or constructed languages. Why stop at the walls of English or Spanish when an entire world lies beyond? Why conform to the rules of one language when you can build your own? For years, I tried to create conlangs. My success varied, and every project ended dishearteningly and much too early. Something still wasn’t clicking, no matter how many times I tried.
Clarity came in the fifth semester of my Spanish for Spanish Speakers class, a course aimed at native Spanish speakers who, like me, had lost immersion with age. The semester’s topic was the philosophy of language. Discussed and taught solely in Spanish, the course brought me much closer to the fundamentals of human communication while rekindling my interest in both Spanish and linguistics.
Both issues clicked at once. By the end of the course, I felt much more confident in my Spanish skills and, therefore, in my Mexican heritage. Likewise, I found the missing piece in my conlanging efforts: new meaning. In previous language attempts, I’d created word-for-word translations of English. The limits were the same, and there was no opportunity to explore new lands. I only realized my error thanks to my newfound connection to Spanish, combined with greater knowledge of linguistics and philosophy. My error was this: I needed to create new words from the heart, not from existing concepts.
Now I’m trying again to create a language. I plan to incorporate philosophical concepts into its very grammar structure. Beyond grammar, words will come from the heart. There will be a word for the feeling of climbing a pass and a word for the sense of watching the sun set through the bus window.
Apapacharé el sentido, dejando que la lengua sea su medio y no su dictador.
I’ll embrace meaning with the soul and let language be its medium, not its dictator.
One January night in 1915, amidst the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution, Dr. Carlos Viesca y Lobatón was rushed out of his Mexico City home and into a railcar bound for Aguascalientes. He was under orders to treat a rebel general, the brother of a close friend. The journey was dangerous and secretive; Viesca y Lobatón’s route was changed during the journey when a rival faction’s ambush was discovered. And, as if to underscore his ride’s importance, he rode next to Pancho Villa, the revolutionary general responsible for the recent seizure of Mexico City. Initially, Viesca y Lobatón failed to notice his company. When he did, the awe was “like that of one who, knowing nothing of taming, finds himself in a cage full of lions” (Viesca y Lobatón 13). The men conversed for a while before the topic turned to Viesca y Lobatón’s profession. Villa suggested that his fellow passenger be put in charge of all hospitals in the state of Chihuahua, no small honor from such an expert strategist. The doctor, though, refused. “During all this,” writes Viesca y Lobatón, “[Villa’s] eyes, green-yellow and feline, remained fixed on mine… I, for my part, and with all serenity, refused to look away until it was he who broke eye contact, upon which I felt a tranquility possible only from a sensation of spiritual superiority and a clean conscience” (Viesca y Lobatón 13).
Stories like Viesca y Lobatón’s were no doubt common in his time – Pancho Villa and his fellow revolutionaries were leaders and public figures, and, as such, interacted with a variety of people on a daily basis – but some mix of poor record-keeping and a focus on more “noteworthy” stories has pushed personal anecdotes aside. Instead of these, the vast majority of available records of the Mexican Revolution are news articles, photographs, and folk songs which emphasize victory in battle instead of any semblance of personality – and there are a lot of them. Villa and other leaders in the Revolution knew news attention could help their public images, and made heavy use of the media. According to historian Nancy Brandt, there is a “vast photographic record” of Villa and his exploits, helped in no small part by his welcoming attitude towards the media and willingness to “[pose] … before, during, and after battles” (Brandt 157). These photos and articles were seen widely throughout the U.S., leading to a heightened awareness of events in the Revolution which lasted from the middle of the 1910s through 1920, the official end of the war (Brandt). Even before the advent of mass media, though, news of Villa’s successes spread with the aid of corridos like the “Corrido de Pancho Villa,” which have immortalized his image (albeit a semi-legendary one) and continue to enjoy popularity in Mexico to this day.
Villa was, according to Brandt, “modern enough to realize the value of a good public image,” and attempted to maintain one throughout his years of rebellion (Brandt 149). Despite this, however, the very news teams he welcomed to his battles and private railcars soured on him as the Mexican Revolution dragged on. Luis Cabrera, an influential intellectual and political advisor who gained prominence during the Revolution, wrote the following in 1917:
Literature on Mexico … in the United States is of an entirely superficial character… It is tinged with shallowness, [and] based on rumors… In many cases those reports have a political purpose and then the facts are not only inaccurate, but are set forth with the intention of moulding opinion… The simplest conclusion … extracted from this galaxy of motives, is that the Mexican people have an incorrigible tendency towards disorder and war, and Mexico is consequently the ‘sick man,’ whose cure is hopeless. (Cabrera 1-2)
The passage, though not directly referring to Villa, excellently presents the very issue that plagued him and his contemporaries the longer they fought: reports on the war were tabloid from the start, but shifted with the mood of the American people the longer the conflict continued.
This was not helped by Pancho Villa’s increasingly frequent raids. For most of the revolution, these had focused on Mexican ranches, and were usually carried out to assassinate political enemies or to secure horses and other supplies for further battles in the North. All the while, the rival rebel faction of Venustiano Carranza kept power in Mexico City, installing Carranza as de facto President of Mexico and opposing Villa in the North and Zapata in the South. Carranza’s government was finally recognized by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in October of 1915. Angered by this sudden policy change, Villa and his forces began attacking American civilians in towns along the U.S.-Mexico border (Brandt). By mid-January of the following year, barely three months after Wilson’s endorsement of Carranza, Villa’s U.S. raids had claimed an estimated 34 innocent lives (Brandt 152). Mere days earlier, wealthy Chihuahuan politician and fierce anti-Villista Luis Terrazas publicly accused Villa of “[torturing] him and … [insulting] his wife with ‘vile oaths’” (Brandt 152). This cyclone of politically motivated media attention, no doubt the unspoken subject of Luis Cabrera’s 1917 statement, drove Pancho Villa’s public opinion into the ground (Cabrera 1-2). The incidents were so disastrous for him that, by early 1916, U.S. troops had crossed the border into Mexico in an attempt to avenge the murdered American nationals – but the media proved fickle again: Brandt writes that “by the time Pershing’s troops re-crossed the border [following involvement in World War I], glory and journalistic interest had long forsaken the entire enterprise” (Brandt 152).
The causticity of the American media, supported by Woodrow Wilson and his administration, burnt through any semblance of personality involved in Villa’s raids. Based on what records remain, it is far too easy to condemn such interactions as attacks on innocent U.S. citizens, unparalleled in barbarism and violence. It is important to remember, however, that the Mexican Revolution would have had nothing to do with the United States were it not for Wilson’s agenda. Furthermore, greater violence was occurring south of the border in frequent attacks on innocent Mexican ranchers. For more information, we turn not to mass media, but to eyewitnesses: Julian Pérez Duarte Rosales, the son-in-law of Carlos Viesca y Lobatón; and his mother, Berta Rosales Pérez Duarte.
In 1914, a year before Viesca y Lobatón’s meeting with Villa, Berta Rosales Pérez Duarte and her husband fled their home in Mexico City and moved to a ranch in the North, their three children in tow (Rosales de Pérez Duarte 23-24). Soon after arrival, while pregnant with her fourth child, Rosales received warning that a band of rebels was planning to raid the family’s ranch (Rosales de Pérez Duarte 23). In her memoirs, she writes the following about her experience fleeing the raid:
I swaddled Berta, Julián Rosales, and Marta, and told them that we were going off camping… I left the house with them [and walked], always looking over our shoulders; passing between crops and furrows, over stone walls and fences … [while] Julián Paredes and the ranch manager kept watch over the house, hidden amongst corn stalks. At 5:00 AM, we would return home… We did this every night for four nights. On the fifth, I armed myself and told Julián Paredes and the children not to expose me [while walking towards the ranch]. If [the rebels] were there, it was God’s will and we would be killed: so be it… by His grace, the warning was false and our home was not assaulted. (Rosales de Pérez Duarte 24)¹
The sheer bravery and willpower required to arm herself, quiet her family, and advance on a potential rebel raid alone with only a rifle is nothing short of astonishing. It paints a picture of resistance and strength far more vivid than any story exaggerated by hostile journalists over the course of the Revolution, whether positive or negative. Rosales de Pérez Duarte, in an act of familial defense, shows exactly why personal stories such as hers and Viesca y Lobatón’s need to be written, preserved and read: they convey volumes in sentences, all without any agenda other than to preserve familial history. Family memoirs are not meant for a wide audience, and this makes them excellent conduits for unbiased history, not only of individuals but of shifting political and societal views. As if to cement this point, Berta’s story continues through her son, Julián Pérez Duarte Rosales, in his own memoirs.
One anecdote stands out among many: that of a second attempted raid on the family ranch, only a year or two after the incident related by his mother. Pérez Duarte Rosales recounts hearing “the clamor of steel-soled boots on the porch” (Pérez Duarte Rosales 13). Mere moments later, “five men with bolt-action rifles … surrounded my father and aimed, point-blank, at his head” (Pérez Duarte Rosales 13). Nevertheless, Rosales’ father kept calm: “after a brief silence that felt like a century, my father, his innards surely tied around his heart … told them: ‘you’d better lower your barrels – I’m not one of the scaredy ones’” (Pérez Duarte Rosales 13). Following Julián Paredes’ orders, the raiding commander gave a signal and released him, indicating that his band required horses.²
The story doesn’t end there, however. Rosales, still listening from inside the house, recalls a brief conversation between his father and the commander, in which his father lied that they had no horses to give. Hearing this, the commander stopped and told his father the following in what Rosales describes as a “deep, gruff voice:” “‘Look at me. I’m from the North. I’m not a murderer. I’m under orders to shoot you and kidnap your wife and children. Now let’s see if you have horses.’” (Pérez Duarte Rosales 14). The implication, as understood by Rosales, was that, if his father was being honest, the commander’s orders to shoot him for his horses could be voided. Sure enough, as Rosales’ father was denying having any animals, “a bray launched forth from the stables. Both men were left dumbfounded. ‘Really?’ said the commander” (Pérez Duarte Rosales 14).
Somehow, the family escaped unscathed once again. Rosales’ father improvised, claiming that the mare must have been feral, but that the soldiers were welcome to take her. The mare, for her part, “refused capture and acted so stubbornly that it seemed she really was feral. Did she understand, by some instinct, what was going on?” wonders Rosales. It’s a tough question, to be sure (Pérez Duarte Rosales 14).
Once again, we are presented with a story which would seem boring to any media outlet, whether in the Mexican Revolution or today. But, as discussed above, a story about something as seemingly unimportant as a failed horse theft can lead to a deeper understanding of a conflict than any “shallow, … politically purposed,” or “inaccurate” tabloid account can give (Cabrera 1). Through a story like this, it’s easy to see the humanity of each side emerging in a bizarre, horseless (or horseful) theater of the Revolution: opposing views brought together by absurdity and confusion, and by a desire to be done with it all. It’s more than one can say about most modern reporting, to say nothing about the major newspapers of the 1910s.
No major news outlet will ever know how Carlos Viesca y Lobatón stared down Pancho Villa and won; how Berta Rosales Pérez Duarte reached for a gun because she was tired of hiding from a potential home invasion; or how her husband, only a year or two later, would order five armed men to stand down and leave his ranch. But these stories, be they off the beaten path, in a railcar at night, or in a disrepaired farmhouse, hold more importance to the culture of Mexico and the United States than any New York Times accusation ever could. They show the human spirit in its purest form, untouched by anything but the desire to protect one’s family; and they offer a glimpse into a deeply personal world that is a privilege to be included in.
Without greater context, it’s difficult to find any connection between me and the events discussed in the above statement. That said, it’s not hard to receive the necessary context, and so I’ll keep things simple: Carlos Viesca y Lobatón, the doctor who refused Pancho Villa and proceeded to stare him down, is my great great grandfather. Berta Rosales de Pérez Duarte, the mother who resolved to put her life at risk to get her family back to bed, is my great great grandmother. Her husband, Julián Pérez Duarte Paredes, is, of course, my great great grandfather. And their son, Julián Pérez Duarte Rosales, who wrote it all down (including centimeter-accurate measurements of window frames, etc.), is my great grandfather. These memories have been passed down orally, digitally, and physically for five generations – and those are only of the Mexican Revolution. Our history goes back centuries, and we are fortunate enough to know most of it. Fortunate is the operative word in that sentence: family recordkeeping is a multigenerational process by definition, and the vast majority of families are not lucky enough to have such a committed base of people. Still fewer have the means by which to devote themselves to the pursuit of history – frankly, as much as my family and I love ourselves, research takes time, energy, and sometimes money; food should usually come first.
I grew up unaware of my roots. I’m sure there were moments when things were explained to me, but I was just as likely distracted by things that mattered less. It is only recently that I’ve had the opportunity to delve into my origins on both sides of the family, and what I’ve found has been extremely revealing.
My father’s family came mainly from Germany early in America’s history. They helped settle Kansas, and, as such, were present for the chaos of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the turmoil of the American Civil War. Before that, they fought in the American Revolution. I learned all of this from my great uncle, Ev, who was kind enough to get me addicted to the topic of family history by sharing his Ancestry.com account with me. He is, as far as I know, one of the few members of my paternal family who is truly invested in the study of our history. It shows. During car rides through the backwoods of Ohio, he shared the frustrations brought by a lack of recordkeeping in the family, leaving him with mainly public records and almost nothing else in many cases. I share his frustration whenever I look at that section of my family tree: of course, he has expanded it massively – but there’s only so much that can be done with census data. We don’t know how our ancestors reacted to the Civil War, or what they did daily, or who their friends were. We mainly know when they were born, when they were baptized, when they died, and where they lived. If we’re lucky, there’s a picture.
Reading the private records and memoirs of my maternal family has made me all the more aware of what we’re missing on the paternal side. For all we know, there could be dozens of Carloses, Bertas, and Juliáns that will never be uncovered. But it’s important to be grateful for what one has, and I could not be happier with the insane attention to detail paid by my mother’s side of the family. It has made it surprisingly easy to connect with my Mexican heritage, going back to the Revolution and further – and, as a result, it’s heightened my awareness of world history and interconnectedness. For that, I thank every member of my family who has put pen to paper and written about their life.
¹ The original Spanish text does not distinguish between Julián Rosales, Berta’s five-year-old son, and Julián Paredes, her husband. For this reason, I’ve used context and included their maternal last names to differentiate them.
² Once again, I’m using maternal last names to differentiate between Julián Rosales, Berta’s son and the memoir’s author; and Julián Paredes, his father and Berta’s husband (see above footnote).
Brandt, Nancy. “Pancho Villa: The Making of a Modern Legend.” The Americas, vol. 21, no. 2, 1964, pp. 146–162, www.jstor.org/stable/979058?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A45a5a1f8c8233f89df120b616b85af2e&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, https://doi.org/10.2307/979058. Accessed 5 May 2025.
Cabrera, Luis. “The Mexican Revolution: Its Causes, Purposes and Results.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 69, 1917, pp. 1–17, www.jstor.org/stable/3804613.
Knight, Alan. “The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a “Great Rebellion”? On JSTOR.” Jstor.org, 2024, www.jstor.org/stable/3338313. Accessed 5 May 2025.
Ochoa, Amparo. Corrido de Pancho Villa. Ediciones Pentagrama, 1995.
Pérez Duarte Rosales, Julián. Cartas a Mis Nietos. 1986. Translated by Marcelo Miller Pérez Duarte, May 2025.
Rosales de Pérez Duarte, Berta. Remembranzas: Mi Vida de 1892 a 1946. 1983. Translated by Marcelo Miller Pérez Duarte, May 2025.
Viesca y Lobatón, Carlos. Diario de Carlos Viesca Y Lobatón. 1912. Translated by Marcelo Miller Pérez Duarte, May 2025.