Shelby

“His bread incident was just like my own story of getting run over. I didn't get hurt, exactly, though I did get to see the underside of something I thought I knew but I didn't. My father and I, in our turn, got to see something new in the middle of what was absolutely familiar, which is the hardest place to see it. Neither of us ever forgot.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“But it was not just my grandmother there waiting for her husband to come home happy or dead. The side stories of revolution were there in Tapachula, a whole town of displaced people put on hold, taken out of time, not so different from the Nogales in which I was raised . . . . they were towns next to countries, but inside countries as well.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“In this place that we live--my West, my father's North, and my mother's new hemisphere--rabbits in a burning field of grass can catch on fire. They run to a clear place where there is no fire, but, in doing so, light it up because their fur is burning. That way, in trying to save themselves, they spread the fire more. . . . And it speeds to everyone.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“I remember one woman making paper flowers to sell, with different herbs . . . She made them so fast, and so many . . . that as I watched, her first few zinnias became quickly enough a few hundred, and grew in their happiness to the size of sunflowers. The sunflowers themselves grew to the size of pumpkins, the snapdragons grew ominous, and the rosemary fragrant.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir