To the Descendants of Runners,

This letter is for those who like me, know that their reason for being an American is because someone before them ran towards the hope and promise they believed awaited them in the United States. 

In my case, I am the proud granddaughter of a runner. Her running started early, leaving her small, rural coastal Caribbean childhood home in Limón, Costa Rica to the capital of San José. I imagine that at 17, she was running away from strict parents and boredom and running towards excitement and promise in the big city.

Dear Brother,

And so, the rest of our brethren have come to know a thing we’ve been telling them for centuries. They have come to understand that perhaps their country does not love and hold them the way the rhetoric of their movies with their perfect endings suggests. They have come to understand the possibility of siege. They feel the raised edges of the crosshairs on the bridges of their noses.

Colonize – the co-optation of a body for purposes not its own