Marcelo Hernandez Castillo on Blindness at the Border

In his recently-published memoir, Children of the Land (Harper, 2020), Castillo writes first-hand about migrating across the Mexico/US border. Paris Review shares this excerpt: 

I don’t know why I went temporarily blind in Tijuana while waiting to cross the border in 1993. It didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t like someone suddenly turned off the lights. First it was the colors that started fading, then it was the shapes, and then shadows altogether. Or maybe not in that order. I could explain the colors leaving, I knew that the world sometimes did that—seemed grayer than usual. I thought it was clouds. I thought the gray came from the walls themselves, and the dried trees and the loose dirt. Maybe that’s just what Tijuana looked like.

But it was shapes I could not explain. Their edges softening into the empty space around them until I couldn’t tell where one thing started and another ended. I could see something was more of itself closer to the center, and less of itself farther out—a gradient. Maybe the soul wasn’t just one thing but an assortment of many little things huddled together, like penguins keeping warm in a blizzard. Or like a flock of birds packed so tightly in a tree that you think they’re all just leaves, until a loud noise startles them and they shudder the bare limbs loose.

Read on at Paris Review.