I was asked a curious question recently.

It came without warning. No drumroll. No academic panel. Just a simple, almost casual inquiry that landed like a stone in still water:

“Do you consider your book a piece of Chicano literature?”

I smiled. I stalled. I probably said something halfway intelligent.

But the truth?

I didn’t have an answer.

And ever since, that question has been sitting across from me like an old friend who isn’t leaving until we talk this through.

So here we are.

Coffee between us. Steam rising. No microphones. No shelves. No labels printed yet.

Just me, asking myself what that even means.

I didn’t grow up using the word Chicano.

Not at the dinner table.

Not on the playground.

Not when we were crossing back and forth between Calexico and Mexicali like it was just part of the day.

I grew up in it. Around it. Breathing it.

But it wasn’t announced.

It wasn’t taught as theory.

It wasn’t framed as movement.

It was just life.

Family on both sides of the border. Spanish sliding in and out of conversations without ceremony. The fence existing, yes, but not defining the fullness of our relationships. The desert sun not caring what country it was shining on.

That was my childhood.

Not ideology. Not identity politics.

Just rhythm.

It wasn’t until I got to UCLA that the vocabulary showed up. That’s where terms like “Chicano identity” had capital letters. That’s where history had frameworks. Where movements had timelines. Where I began to understand that what felt ordinary to me had a name — and a lineage — and a struggle attached to it.

But as a kid? I wasn’t thinking about cultural reclamation.

I was thinking about baseball in the backyard and which side of the border had the better tacos that week.

So when someone asks me now if my book is Chicano literature, I have to pause.

Because I didn’t set out to write a manifesto.

But I did set out to write something cultural.

Very intentionally.

The first book — especially — was my attempt to capture a place and a time. Calexico. Mexicali. That particular border. Not the abstract idea of “the border,” but ours. The one where families blurred the line. Where the desert carried stories both ways. Where the 1980s felt slower, more intimate, less surveilled. Before everything hardened.

I wasn’t trying to argue anything.

I was trying to preserve something.

And preservation is cultural work.

The twin cities of Calexico and Mexicali aren’t just neighboring municipalities. They are a shared ecosystem. A lived simultaneity. A daily choreography of crossings, commerce, cousins, classrooms, and carne asada smoke drifting wherever it pleased.

That’s not a backdrop.

That’s a character.

And if I’m honest with myself, I didn’t want that version of the place to disappear without someone writing it down.

So what does that make the book?

Is writing about Mexican American border life — intentionally, lovingly, specifically — enough to place it in the Chicano literary conversation?

Maybe.

But here’s where I argue with myself.

One side of me says:

You didn’t grow up claiming that label. You weren’t marching under it. You weren’t reading the movement’s foundational texts at twelve years old. You were just living your life.

The other side says:

Exactly. That life was shaped by the very history that produced the Chicano movement. You may not have named it, but you lived downstream from it.

Family members on both sides embodied it in different ways. Some politically. Some culturally. Some quietly. It wasn’t forced on me. It flowed around me. It was ambient. Like music playing in another room — you don’t analyze it as a child, but it becomes part of your internal soundtrack.

So am I Chicano?

I don’t know that the answer is automatic.

Mexican heritage alone doesn’t hand you a label. “Chicano” has always carried an element of choice. Of assertion. Of relationship to history.

I didn’t reject it.

I just didn’t grow up consciously wearing it.

And yet — when I write about my childhood on that border, there is no version of those stories that exists without that cultural context. The humor, the language shifts, the assumptions about family, the way the border is treated not as spectacle but as ordinary geography — those aren’t accidental details.

They’re baked in.

So maybe the better question isn’t “Does this qualify?”

Maybe the better question is, “What role am I playing?”

I’m not writing protest literature.

I’m not writing academic analysis.

I’m not trying to define a movement.

What I am doing is saying:

This place mattered.

This version of the border mattered.

These people — my people — mattered.

Their ordinary days were worthy of ink.

And if that sits somewhere within the broad, evolving landscape of Chicano literature, then maybe that’s okay.

And if it sits adjacent to it — influenced by it, shaped by it, but not explicitly declaring it — maybe that’s okay too.

Because at the end of the day, I didn’t write the book to fit a shelf.

I wrote it because I could feel that time slipping away.

I wrote it because Calexico and Mexicali in that era deserved a snapshot before memory softened the edges too much.

I wrote it because I wanted my kids — and maybe someone else’s — to understand that the border is not just policy and headlines. It’s laughter. It’s cousins. It’s heat. It’s music drifting across neighborhoods. It’s belonging that refuses to be split cleanly in two.

So here I am.

Coffee cooling.

Still not committing to a label.

But also no longer pretending the question doesn’t matter.

Maybe I don’t have to plant a flag.

Maybe it’s enough to say: I am a writer shaped by a Mexican American border life.

I am preserving a culture I love.

And I am aware — now — that this work lives in conversation with a larger history, whether I shout it or not.

That feels honest.

And for today, in this coffee conversation with myself,

honest is enough.

***

If you haven’t read Mostly Made Up Stories from a Small Town Nobody, you can grab a copy here: https://a.co/d/03pH7lLl

I know, I know. Shameless plug.

But this is a conversation. And to have a meaningful conversation, we need context. So read the book. Sit with it. 

Then grab some coffee.

Because this is a good conversation.

And I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

There’s more waiting at https://xinkblotz.com. Telling stories, sharing thoughts, and drinking coffee. A blend of fiction, reflection, and whatever’s brewing – one post at a time.