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.

A few months ago, I was sucked into a TV wormhole by starting to watch the CW television network's show Reign on Netflix. The show dramatizes the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, as she rules over France, recaptures Scotland, and makes a claim for the English throne as an unwavering Catholic. In the latter seasons, her cousin, Elizabeth Tudor (portrayed by Rachel Skarsten) joins the show as the Protestants and Catholics wage war against each other.

My first experience (and the only one for that matter) of an online class was during the junior year of my undergraduate degree. It was a course on Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican archaeology, a subject in which I was very much interested. However, I do not remember much of the class other than getting a good grade.

Author's note: The term curandera (feminine pronoun) will be used throughout the text since traditionally, most healers tend to be women.

Gloria Anzaldúa described the U.S./Mexico border as una herida abierta, an open wound. I first read Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza in an undergraduate course at New Mexico State University (NMSU) with Dr. Joyce Garay. I had never read anything like it.