Dia de los Muertos celebrations have appeared in movies like James Bond, Superman, The Book of Life, and Coco in varying degrees of accuracy to the holiday and its authenticity of Mexican culture. Although I love seeing the festivities dear to my culture on screen, there are a couple misconceptions about what Dia de los Muertos represents to Mexican people.

I was talking to my father the other day about the commonalities between race talk and gender talk. What's said and explicitly represented in private conversations often falls short in real life—a marked attitude-behavior gap. This gap refers to the idea of personal attitudes not matching public behavior. This cognitive dissonance is more common than you might think. Often it comes from a lack of personal discomfort despite understanding, on an intellectual level, that an issue is wrong. It is difficult to understand the daily obstacles of a queer LGBT individual if you are heterosexual, just as it is difficult to internalize the struggles of a Black man if you’re not Black and so on and so forth.

By Paolo Biccheri
www.watermelaninmag.com

I had no idea how scary this Fall would be, but then Brett Kavanaugh appeared.

You left.

Don’t all the best stories start this way: at the beginning of the end. Just after things get difficult. This story is about leaving therapy, about being the therapist and walking out. It is about stepping away from a belief system you had given your life to for ten years. 

Exiting the work was a process. You move away from the constant simmer of emotions, forget the polyester smell of the couch cushions, and return to the memories of borrowed time and fifty minutes filled with silence, anguish, and trauma. These were the hardest things to do. Can you talk about these things? Or at least try? 

Stranded.
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That’s how many families feel while journeying across the blistering hot and terrifyingly cold Jacumba Desert. It might be a persistent thought as they confront the countless dangers laying like traps in the night. And stranded they feel once they make it to the United States.

The isolation of the American Immigrant Crisis. 

One cartoon is capturing the uniqueness of our cultural moment, our tragic pain and shame as a nation. Steven Universe, Cartoon Network’s first female and non-binary led cartoon, is giving viewers instructions on how to love. It is teaching audiences that nontraditional families from different places are heroic.

In the middle of a blistering June, I sat sandwiched on a bench with forty other mostly white American middle and high schoolers in the belly of the largest enclosed tropical botanical garden in southern China. Although the greenery surrounding us was very much real, the giant “tree” that made up the walls of our dining space was fake, carefully molded to look like the bark of a real hundred foot tree. Chinese caterers bustled around us, talking to each other in rapid Cantonese while they pulled white box after white box of prepackaged lunch out from large plastic trash bags.