✍🏽 "Salvation Hambre" 📖 excerpt "From Phoenix to San Antonio" ➡️ my grandma Alicia This story may seem so small, but it's one of the few I have from my grandma. She grew up in an orphanage in Juarez and being in El Paso last summer was the closest I've ever got to where she's from. I searched for this church, hoping to walk the same streets she once did. Hoping I may understand her a little more, get a glimpse into the life she once lived, but had no luck despite all my sleuthing. I've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up separated from your family, both immediate and extended. And even more so what it means to not even know them. I know we find belonging in a lot of different places but there's something about where your family came from, the context that birthed the knowledge of your ancestors. How do you grieve what you never knew? For me, writing my grandma's story, even in the smallest of ways, is not just a form of documentation, it's self preservation.