We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others and yet this makes us a little crazy as Louis Alberto Ureya observes.

What a refreshing helpful way into the deep meaning and the problem of borders, what they

are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us.

This wise and exuberant writer says that a deep truth of our time is that we miss each other. And the Mexican-American border was as close and

personal to him as it could get when he was growing up, an apt expression of his

parents turbulent Mexican-American divorce.

Ever since I had this conversation with him,

I have not heard a news report of something

happening at the southern border of my country without having his voice in my head,

confounding every caricature of Mexicans and the suffering human beings we now call migrants. I am also eternally grateful

for the way he complicated my imagination about the moral agency of a US border

guard. In this conversation he offers a vision of the

larger possibility of our time beyond the terrible tangles of today, which he

lives and witnesses with his writing, that we might evolve the old

illusion of the melting pot to a 21st century richness of us, And delightfully, he models that messiness and humor will be required.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being. Louis Alberto Ureia writes poetry, and non-fiction.

His books include,

Into the Beautiful North, the Devil's Highway,

the Hummingbird's Daughter, and a 2023 novel,

Good Night Irene, inspired by his mother's service in the Red Cross.

I interviewed him in 2018 in the St. Croix Valley on the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Good evening. I'm delighted to be here tonight with

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