Christian Century - Latino churches are social service hubs
“In 2022, a groundbreaking study revealing that approximately 94 percent of Hispanic churches and faith-based organizations provide extensive social services. The research underlines what churches like Iglesia Misionera Cristo Vive and Our Lady of Guadalupe have long embodied: that the Latino church offers an essential social safety net for its members, and for Latino and immigrant communities at large.”
Sojourners - Holy Mary, Mother of Gardens
“I begin in the garden, which sounds biblical but is literal. It’s the day after the spring equinox, and I’m standing outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The National Shrine is the nation’s largest Roman Catholic church. It’s stuffed to the vaulted ceilings with religious art, but I’m not here for the soaring mosaics and gilded icons.”
Bellingham Review - Touching What Scorches
“If what is most publicly and readily visible about raising children is the tedium of caregiving, perhaps it takes writers in its throes of parenting to reveal its subterranean depths. Raising an infant can indeed be stifling and mundane. It is not, on the surface, the stuff of epics. But beneath the superficial details about nipple shields and morning sickness hums a nearly inexpressible current of love and fear that has the power to both shatter and remake.”
Ekstasis - To Share a Home
“The difficulty of interdependence is that it asks us not only to accept sustenance, but also to extend it outward—which requires us to be proximate to the suffering and needs of other members of our ecosystem.”
Atmos - What’s the Real Cost of Mezcal?
“Since the early 2010s, mezcal has grown from a little-known ancestral drink to the spirit sitting next to tequila on bar shelves across the world. But even as mezcal gains visibility on this side of the border, the spirit’s environmental toll back in Mexico remains hidden from most consumers.”
Civil Eats - Can Cooperatives Save Mezcal?
“A booming mezcal market is fueling unsustainable farming and production practices in Mexico. But collective ownership helps growers protect agave’s genetic diversity, local biodiversity, and mezcal’s ancestral roots.”
The Atavist - A Feast for Lost Souls
“Returning to familiar flavors they’d once shared with a child or a husband allowed grief to rush in and take shape, like seawater filling a hole dug in the sand. Cooking was a way to give voice to the unspeakable. It acknowledged the eternal absence of mouths the women longed to feed, of lives cut short by senseless violence.”
Winner of a James Beard Journalism Award, Dart Award, and Overseas Press Club Award
The Rumpus - The Flowers You Left Us
“Looking at the two stems housed in a water glass on my kitchen table, it strikes me that ‘in the ground’ means opposite things for flowers and people. As long as a flower remains in the ground, it lives.”
EcoTheo Review - Luminosity
“After several months the insomnia faded—doctors chalked it up to my age, a time of developmental leaps and changes in the brain. But for years afterward, I recalled that feeling of isolation and the sense of darkness as a void.”
National Geographic - In Mexico’s Forests, a Year Without Tourists
“Across Mexico, ecotourism plays a key role in forest conservation by addressing the twin problems of rural poverty and deforestation. But the pandemic has stalled—and in some areas, halted—ecotourism from domestic and international visitors alike. What does this mean for the forests?”
Templeton Ideas - Edna Adan Ismail Wants to Fix the World
“Edna Adan Ismail has chased soldiers toting automatic rifles out of her operating room. She’s been imprisoned under a military dictatorship and fought off hungry hyenas while evacuating the wounded from a war zone. But ask Edna how she would describe herself and she won’t reach for the attention-grabbing stories. ‘I’m a nurse, I’m a midwife,’ she answers immediately.
The Sunday Long Read - Outrunning Death With the Monarchs
“Every fall, an insect no more substantial than a potato chip flies roughly 3,000 miles from southeastern Canada to central Mexico, subsisting on nectar and riding the wind. In 2019, a group of humans joined the butterflies for an improbable migration of their own.”
National Geographic - The Deep, Watery History of the Basque Cider House
“The sagardotegi is central to Basque community and culinary identity. But to truly understand the importance of the cider house, you first must travel back in time several hundred years—and then out to sea.”
The Millions - Intimate Strangers: Reading Airport Essays in a Pandemic
“This gets at something I love about traveling through public spaces: that it is monotonous and dull and sometimes thrilling, because it occasionally opens a window into other lives and the universes those lives contain.”
Image - How a Body Responds
“When the chicken slaughter began, I wasn’t thinking about mortality or food ethics or my fraught relationship with meat; I was concentrating on not fainting. It happens occasionally—a minor embarrassment in doctor’s offices, hospitals, and, once, a high school English class.”
Plough Quarterly - What the Light Passes Through
“Pinning words to a religious experience is a little like pinning a butterfly to an insect board, only as soon as you push the tack through the thorax the butterfly dissolves and you are left without the beauty, just the instrument to display it.”
Civil Eats - What Role Can Vineyards Play in Conserving California’s Biodiversity?
“Grapevines cover 635,000 acres in California. Given this scale, a commitment to growing grapes to boost biodiversity can produce a number of environmental benefits, as threats to the land—including urbanization, clearing, and climate change—intensify.”
Life & Thyme - Citrus for Sourdough, Eggs for Yeast
“A scene that would have seemed old fashioned at the beginning of this year is now commonplace: one neighbor passes a bouquet of herbs over the fence to another, who disappears into the house and returns with homemade bread.”
Civil Eats - Rolando Herrera is Blazing a Trail for Latinx Winemakers
“Rolando Herrera is a bit of a unicorn in California’s Napa Valley. For one thing, he’s transcended the wine region’s traditional hierarchy. For another, he’s that rarely seen combination: a winemaker who also grows grapes.”
Hidden Compass - Trick of the Light
“As I land in Thailand, my understanding of prostitution is limited to movie depictions, cursory research about sex trafficking, and glimpses of women on street corners: in other words, it is distant and limited. Pattaya is about to change that.”
Notable Mention in America’s Best Travel Writing 2019
Ekstasis - Celestial and Strange: On Art that Disrupts
“Taken as a whole, the Sagrada Familia is a bizarre mingling of aesthetics. It defies imagination and shakes us out of tidy stories. You may be offended or you may be moved, as countless critics and visitors have been in equal measure.”
Brevity - Capturing the Numinous: Mary Karr’s Sacred Carnality
“Karr’s prose and poetry return again and again to the body and the mouth, site of burger bites and cool swallows of water. Her writing stills and sates, reminding the reader that love exists not to be earned but to be taken and drunk.”
The Millions - The Awe and Attention of Durga Chew-Bose
“I read Too Much and Not the Mood in my final residency of graduate school. I was leaving behind two years of immersion in language, and my preemptive nostalgia meant paying closer attention than usual to my surroundings: the spike of sage in the air, the rock-salt rim of a margarita, a poem recited aloud as trees waved in agreement outside the window.”