heritage

Indigenous people throughout the world already face so many challenges; they don’t need non-Indigenous people appropriating their cultures and championing family lore as fact. The genocide of Indigenous people is an ongoing travesty throughout the world

Immigrants are pushed out of their home countries due to social, political, or economic forces beyond their control — poverty, genocide, wartime.... I doubt many Salvadorans of my mother's generation fled El Salvador to go “find themselves.”

In the photograph, my great-grandmother, Margarita Cirigliano, is sitting at a small table on the front porch of the family home in Borough Park, Brooklyn.