Without love, we're dead. - Rudy Ruiz

Borders are a motif in my writing. I was born and raised on the border, and my writing always takes me back there. They say you can take a person out of the border but you can't take the border out of a person. That saying definitely applies to me. Growing up, the border was an invisible line my family and I crossed every day. Because of that, I see borders as porous membranes through which people, animals, goods, services, and the environment must continuously traverse and transmit back and forth.

In a way, diving into that Western and horror aspect of it, it felt like it freed me. It freed me up to have more fun with it in a way, maybe because I wasn't taking myself or my writing as seriously and I was just having fun within those genres. I found it liberating. It's weird to say, because you're putting some constraints around yourself. But then within those constraints, you just opened up this universe within which I could have a lot of fun.

Parting ways in the plaza, Solitario sat tall in his saddle surveying the changing cityscape. A ball of tumbleweeds rolled aimlessly across the deserted plaza, drifts of dead leaves chasing after it, rustling in the incessant wind. He squinted at the cathedral from beneath his broad sombrero. He saw cracks growing in it with every passing moment. Yes, we will build wells, he thought in response to Elias' question. The water may keep us alive, but it will no longer protect us from our neighbor to the north. Nobody had mentioned it openly yet, but surely others were thinking about it just as he was. With the river rerouted south, they were no longer in Mexico. Their fate rested not on La Virgen's apparition, but in America's hands.