What The Border Taught Norma Elia Cantú About Being Free

Death, Sex & Money

Slate Podcasts

Business, Health & Fitness, Society & Culture, Careers, Relationships, Sexuality

4.6 • 7.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2021

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The 74-year-old writer on growing up in Laredo, Texas, and the three family deaths that changed her.

Our national live call-in show, Getting Real About Getting Older, is tonight! (Wednesday, February 3, at 8 pm Eastern) Anna and co-host Jo Ann Allen will be be taking calls from listeners over 60 about getting older right now—if that's you, call in, and listen on your local public radio station or via The Greene Space.

We've been sharing stories from listeners and guests over 60 all month long. Check out our previous episodes featuring Marlo Thomas, and guest host Jo Ann Allen in conversation with older listeners about unexpected health challenges and financial instability; feelings of isolation, invisibility and freedom; and shifting relationships with friends and loved ones at deathsexmoney.org/aging. You'll also find some of our favorite reading and listening about people over 60 and a playlist of some of our favorite past Death, Sex & Money episodes with older guests.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's a way that we grow up on the border with the skills of negotiating different worlds
0:07.1	and all of that.
0:08.6	You don't get that anywhere else or I couldn't get it anywhere else.
0:12.9	So I really appreciated where I came from at the same time, it freed me to know that I
0:18.8	could go anywhere.
0:20.5	That the border was who I was, that's who I am.
0:24.5	But it's not a limiting space.
0:27.6	This is Death, Sex, and Money.
0:37.1	The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.
0:44.6	I'm Anna Seale.
0:53.0	When I talked with writer Norma Eliakuntu, she was preparing to sell her child to
0:57.6	her house in La Rada, Texas, on the US-Mexico border.
1:01.5	A lot of her essays and poetry are about that small woodframe house, which was set up
1:06.3	on stilts to protect it from annual floodwaters.
1:09.9	But as she moved the last of her family's belongings out, she told me she wasn't really
1:14.3	mourning the building itself.
1:15.8	I think now that we're all gone and there's no one there.
1:20.4	It's just the house.
1:22.5	When you think of home right now, what does that make you think of?
1:28.1	Oh, three things.
1:31.3	My childhood, that was home.
1:35.4	Where I am now, I think that's home.
	...

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