😮 I removed the handcuffs from a prisoner and recognized the tattoo of my dead father. He died in Vietnam three months before I was born; I never knew him. 💔 And this 67-year-old man, accused of stealing medicine from a pharmacy, had the same military badge on his arm that my mother has had framed in the living room for forty-eight years.

yell at me.” I went back the next day. Fifty years of running, and I was coming back.

That’s how I learned his name. Tomás. Until that moment, I didn’t even know the name of the man for whom my father gave his life.

“If they lock me up,” he said, “Güero will have no one to feed him. That’s why I begged you not to talk. Not for me, daughter. For him.” continue reading …