By Brian Rivera

One of the first things my mother did when we arrived in Juárez was to enroll us in school in El Paso. When the school administration asked for an address to prove that we lived within the district, my mother gave my grandmother’s address in El Paso. For a year, we crossed the border daily.

By Sam Quinones

About three weeks before the start of my senior year in high school, I needed a job that I could quit easily when school began. I was 17. I went down to Tropical Ice Cream.

A pasty-faced man with gray hair met me at the door. I think his name was Ed.

Nineteen, I told him. He asked for my driver’s license. Simple math would have told him my true age. You’re hired, he said.

By Diego Renteria

I was accustomed to the occasional grito or exhortation in the middle of songs, clapping at the end of songs, and song requests, but this audience seemed unusually indifferent.