Missionaries took Consuelo in before she learned to walk she appeared one day, a naked cub caked with mud and excrement, crawling across the footbridge from the dock like a tiny Jonah vomited up by some freshwater whale. She was marked forever by that landscape, and in some way she managed to pass that sign on to me. Consuelo, my mother, spent her childhood in an enchanted region where for centuries adventurers have searched for the city of pure gold the conquistadors saw when they peered into the abyss of their own ambitions. My father, an Indian with yellow eyes, came from the place where the hundred rivers meet he smelled of lush growing things and he never looked directly at the sky, because he had grown up beneath a canopy of trees, and light seemed indecent to him. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory. My name is Eva, which means “life”, according to a book of names my mother consulted. Int'l Women's Conference - México, 2013.Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Ceremony, 2017.
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