The Devil Takes You Home

by Gabino Iglesias

Not all white people have the same level of privilege, but they all share an aversion to being forced to step momentarily into otherness.

Being broke is not a financial status; it’s a state of mind. It breaks you. Every setback pushes you closer to believing you don’t deserve better, that you’re struggling because you deserve it, because you’re worthless.

Sometimes, I think faith is like a disease in our genes, something we can’t escape despite knowing we should. However, I couldn’t help but feel that what had happened, and my response to it, meant there was someone looking out for me.

sometimes God is your copilot, but it’s the Devil who takes you home.”

hey! that's the name of the show!

Whoever said it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all was probably an asshole who never lost anything they actually loved.

When men look at the business end of a gun, masculinity becomes a sandcastle built too close to the tide.

The new me enjoyed violence, especially righteous violence,

Being in the presence of monsters is okay as long as you don’t think too much about what they’re capable of. The scarier thing is when you realize what you’re capable of yourself.

People are usually surprised when they hit the border and realize there’s no change in the landscape, no giant dividing line in the sky. The land doesn’t care about the stupid lines humans insist on drawing on them, and the southern border is no different. There’s nothing there that makes it obvious you’re approaching an interstitial space between cultures, nothing that says people of one color live on one side and people of a different color inhabit the opposite side. Instead, there’s a short, dark fence next to the road and more empty space, a few bushes, and more dry earth.

That doesn’t happen in El Paso. Things on both sides of the river look more or less the same and the streets of both sides are packed with brown and white faces, the same food, the same air, and the same Spanish and English words thrown back and forth. That what happens in la frontera is so problematic is shocking. Viewed from the border itself, the conflict is not between two countries; it’s an argument between neighbors that occupy the same land but don’t share the same privileges, and it’s an argument often policed by people who don’t even live anywhere near that neighborhood.

Fear is like steroids for stupidity.

We go back to our native tongue for important things. We return to our native tongue to speak of our mothers, the food of our childhood. We return to our native tongue to ask for forgiveness and to pray.

We were there to get a vehicle full of guns and somehow Brian ended up getting a job offer and I was called an undocumented immigrant. That’s how systemic racism works. It was so dumb it was almost funny. It was the story of my life: my education and my résumé never looked as good or as trustworthy as a white man in a suit. This time around, I was losing a job opportunity to a sweaty junkie with bloodshot eyes who’d been eating Adderall like candy.