There’s a quiet power in being an immigrant. You learn to belong everywhere because you’ve been told you belong nowhere. You learn to build not because you were invited, but because you refused to disappear.

In August 2004, I flew with my grandmother from Mexico City to Nogales, Sonora, a border town. I was 13 years old, traveling to meet my family in Georgia. My grandmother didn’t cross with me. She was there to get me safely to the border, and to make sure I was in the hands of the coyote who would take me the rest of the way.

I had heard of coyotes before, the people who guide undocumented immigrants across the U.S. border. But as a teenager, I imagined actual coyotes. They are sneaky, fast, and sometimes dangerous. That’s how my aunt and grandmother spoke about them, like half whispe

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