So the pieces I want to share with you are ones that I wrote,
that largely came from ideas and themes
that Gareth photographed when he first
went to that region on the O'odham homeland
but on the Sonora side.
And in a way, it was a good thing
that he started on the Sonora side
because that's where I'm from.
Both my parents and all their people before them,
that's their homeland and their traditional village
is on that side.
And that's exactly where Gareth went
was to Quitovac, which is my mother's
home and her parents' home.
And so it meant a lot to me to see the images that he captured
and then also other parts of the border,
the villages there, the O'odham villages.
And I told them stories and a lot of it
was from my early childhood and then a little bit older.
I remember going to those places and spending summers there
with my mother's mother, our grandmother.
And we lived with her there as young people.
So it wasn't easy to write about that region.