This summer, deep in the green hills of Vermont, where the maple syrup is more consistent than the wifi connections, I stayed in a rustic cabin without air conditioning, a stovetop, or insulation from the lightning storms and humid waves of heat. It was my third summer in Vermont, teaching for the Bread Loaf School of English program for Middlebury College, which was made popular by poet Robert Frost’s affiliation with the program. This summer I found myself reflecting on incorporating personal writing--and family stories from “home”--into research that draws attention to overlooked communities.

(Sign near the Frost hiking path and at the bottom of the wooden street headed to his cabin.)

(From Robert Frost hiking trail next to Bread Loaf campus where selected poems dot the path)

Surprisingly, I spent a fair amount of time reading my own writing because the editor for my book Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay asked me to read the typeset version of the book to look for typos or other errors. After the first round of proofing the typeset version, I was asked by the editor to re-read looking at the few changes that were made. Proofreading what I’ve been writing for the last few years, I can more clearly see the necessity of speaking about individual experiences that can speak to a larger community concern.

In support of my book, I took it upon myself to make a trailer. Since my book has research relating to my lived experiences, I also chose to include personal images of myself and family, in addition to some relevant news headlines that support some of the more sensitive issues raised in the book. I grappled with the amount of my family’s history that I include in the book’s preface and video; however, I concluded that it was important to explain my grandmother’s complicated Guatemalan heritage to make the Guatemalan migrant community I discuss in the book more familiar through my personal connection. 

Sanctuary book trailer: Sanctuary book trailer 

(From right: Cruz Medina, his son Jackson, and grandmother Dorothy Medina)

Strangely enough, most of the personal details included in the preface and trailer were written after the book had gone through the initial peer-review process. Perhaps I could have published the book without acknowledging some painful issues like the abuse my father experienced while in the seminary, ultimately triggering addiction that contributed to his death at the age of 56. But in my writing, I speak about violence and its impact on the population I worked with at the church. In addition, I advocate in Sanctuary for decolonial thinking that imagines new worlds that break from the traditions of violence and subjugation. More importantly, I recognize the messiness of my volunteer teaching at the “Sanctuary” church, which makes me complicit in colonial legacies that have impacted my family and Indigenous people across the Americas even as I was responding to the request for English classes from a displaced Indigenous migrant community. Still, it’s better to error when trying than to regret not helping where we could.