Victoria blanco

Writer

El Paso, TX

11/1/22—11/4/22

As we drive across Loop 375, the El Paso highway running parallel to the border, writer Victoria Blanco tells us how the towering steel wall we see now was just a chain link fence, broken in many places, for her entire childhood. She came home from college during a break to discover the entire wall had been built in the few months she was gone. Despite its now-monumental presence in the two cities she calls home, El Paso and Juarez, she reminds us people lived without it for generations and its ongoing existence is not inevitable.

After completing her undergrad, Victoria used her Fulbright scholarship to kickstart her research and immersive cultural exploration of the Rarámuri people, an indigenous tribe native to the Chihuahuan desert. She has spent years forging meaningful relationships with the women of the tribe, some of whom were introduced to the group in Juarez. Her research is focused on their passive resistance to assimilation into mainstream Mexican society as climate change and cartels have forced many out of the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains and into the cities.

She advised us not only to resist accepting the barriers and walls we face in our own lives, but to resist borders in our writing as well. She taught us to leave genre at the door and to “bring as much joy to the art-making as possible.”

By Kaitlyn Salazar