Around my neck hangs a rosary of wooden beads given to me by my friend Andrés the night of his departure for Mexico last November. “Ni modo, Jason,” I remember him telling me just minutes before their truck pulled away from our parking lot one last time. “Ni modo:” roughly, “No way.” It was a phrase often repeated between us. The friendship I have enjoyed with Andrés has left me with an acute awareness of the disjunction between the personal realities of friendship and family and the legislation that often works against such realities. In our friendship we feel the tension between the deep reality of a friendship forged across cultural boundaries and the borders that temporarily impose physical distance between us.Continue Reading →