Tangelli Rodriguez de Orbe defies category. Yes, she is a poet, an accomplished spoken word artist, a cultural expression activist.

But beyond that, she is a free thinker who has a

truly incredible ability to describe experiences that we talk about a lot, the pain points of migration,

the limits of familiar responsibility, in ways that feel raw and honest and new. We talk about the

importance of black immigrant narratives, both to immigrants themselves and to our political discourse, and the life-changing power of refusing to be a martyr.

Danjali, thank you for doing this.

Thank you for having me.

One of the themes you return to over and over in your work is this idea of being better in your homeland, of having left parts of yourself in your homeland, the yearning to return to something that some would argue is impossible to return to, can you

describe to me, Danjely, your first experience of that, what you remember, the first time you

remember thinking, there is a part of me

that is missing. I think I realized that parts of me were missing when I returned. I migrated when I was

eight years old and I wasn't able to go back to the DR until I was 21. And when I returned and I was on that plane and I

journaled and I waited for my uncle to pick me up at the airport, it felt like something was

returning to me that I didn't know was missing. Obviously, you know, being undocumented,

you miss home, you miss

the friends that you left behind, you miss family members. But there is something particular

that happens in the body when you go back to the place where people still remember, the nickname

that your grandma used to call you when you were five, the place where the neighbors

look at you in the face and say, wait, I remember that face,

is that so-and-so's daughter.

There are certain words that are just simply don't exist for the feeling of walking in your

neighborhood after, as a grown woman, and knowing that there was a big chunk of who you could

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