Sublime

Calles Sol and Cruz. The stream of visitors seemed endless, and on the first floor below them, the Bar Borinqueña became a hot spot for journalists and university students.

In December of 1982, the Cuban-born Luis Alvarez, a Miami police officer, shot and killed Neville Johnson Jr., a young Black Caribbean American man, in an Overtown arcade as Johnson was playing a video game. The following conflagration left eighteen dead and shut down more than two hundred businesses. There was no conviction.

According to the poem by Antonio Machado, “there is no road, the road is made by walking,” but in my case it felt more like I was stumbling down narrow, winding paths that were often swallowed up by vegetation.

reticence,

From the grown-up talk around, I deduced that I’d escaped some terrible fate back in Sicily, where everyone was poor and hungry. We were also poor and hungry. I grew up nourished by a story, the story of my good fortune—I was an American citizen, I lived in the richest country in the world, where I would learn English, work hard, marry well, and

THE DIALECTIC OF ORDINARY DISASTER Once or twice each decade, Hawaii sends Los Angeles a big, wet kiss. Sweeping far south of its usual path,