One of my very first memories is of sitting in my Abuela Alicia’s tiny apartment in San Juan. I was five years old and the roar of the highway just outside her window was a sort of soundtrack to her morning routine. The cars honked angrily as she prepared her café colao the same way she had ten thousand times before. I would watch, mesmerized, as she held the well-worn mesh strainer over her coffee cup and let the coffee slowly drip out. Abuela would take these moments to talk to me about some of the challenges that I would face in life. The biggest of which would be surviving [...]