I have been a resident of the Borderland all my life, graduating from El Paso High School in 2012, earning my B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2016, and working towards my M.A. throughout the current pandemic. I remember listening attentively to my history classes, learning of the great endeavors of the nation’s founding fathers, the wars that shaped the state of Texas as we know it, and wrapping up the school year with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. This is what has been traditionally taught throughout Texas, yet it is hardly a complete story.

America is now in the throes of an opioid epidemic.  To some of us, it seems to have swooped down from nowhere, a mysterious plague that descended on the United states seemingly overnight.  But, of course, we know that's not the case.  We know it was the result of numerous events and factors, interconnected and complex, that occurred over a series of decades.

This is my first year as part of the Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP, and when I began in the program, I was very curious about meeting my team and learning about our research topic. I was assigned to work with Zaira Crisafulli, an El Paso Community College (EPCC) English professor, Malia Nelson, a student at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and Jireh Nelson, a dual credit student at EPCC.

I have been in school most of my life, and it has taken me years to truly reflect on why. While I grew up loving school and the experience of going to school year after year, my narrative was always tied to my parents’ narrative and their expectations. Like so many others, I grew up knowing my parents had moved to the United States at a young age and worked their entire lives in physically taxing jobs in order to offer me and my siblings a chance at a better future. That seemingly common idea in El Paso, Texas, is a motivation but also, as Kenneth Burke would put it, a terministic screen.