I write this as a Honduran and as a citizen of the United States, from a life shaped by migration, rupture, survival, refusal, and a relationship to land that national borders have changed but never eliminated.

My maternal grandmother, Herminia Pinto, came from Ocotepeque, within ancestral and living Maya Ch’orti’ terrain. We had no continuing relationship with extended relatives there. Ocotepeque reached me through my grandmother, Tía Amelia, and Tía Catalina rather than through regular returns, a broad network of kinship, or an intact account of our genealogy. What I inherited was both location and rupture: the knowledge of where my grandmother came from alongside the absence of the relationships and historical continuity that might have told us more fully how our lineage had been formed there.

Through the circumstances of my parents’ lives, I was born at the Hospital de Occidente in Santa Rosa de Copán. I remained in Copán for the first three months of my life because I needed to complete medical treatments prescribed by local curanderas. Copán was the place of my birth and earliest healing, rather than the place where I was raised.

I grew up in La Lima until I was twelve. La Lima, shaped by the banana economy, SITRATERCO, labor organizing, migration, and the movement of people through the northern coast, was the social and political terrain of my childhood.

I did not choose to leave Honduras at twelve. Had the decision been mine, I would have remained. My departure interrupted a childhood and a relationship to place that were still actively forming. A Honduran later told me that I was no longer Honduran because I had left the country at twelve. Yet leaving at that age was neither a rejection of Honduras nor a declaration that I belonged elsewhere. It was a change imposed upon my life before I possessed the authority to determine its direction.

At twenty-two, I made a different decision. I chose to leave Honduras when my life became endangered because of my queerness. That departure was an act of survival. It carried the grief of knowing that the country to which I belonged could not safely hold the fullness of who I was.

Last year, I encountered another form of rejection. My Honduran belonging was tacitly questioned while, at the same time, I was being looked to as a source of financial support. I was being asked to remain useful to Honduras while accepting that someone else might retain the authority to determine whether I belonged to it.

I chose to leave again.

This time, leaving was an enactment of my right of refusal. I refused a relationship in which my belonging could be withheld while my labor, resources, and care remained available for extraction. I refused to prove my Honduranness through usefulness, financial contribution, endurance, or exposure to harm.

A body like mine knows intimately the conditions through which violence enters the lives of women in Honduras. Danger does not always announce itself openly. It moves through contempt, exclusion, entitlement, coercion, gendered expectation, the testing of boundaries, and the presumption that a woman will continue to give even when her dignity and safety have become uncertain.

I have nothing to prove.

I do not have to remain where I am being diminished in order to demonstrate love for Honduras. I do not have to tolerate rejection to establish that I belong. I do not have to make my body, resources, or political commitment available to people who question my legitimacy while expecting my support.

At twelve, I left without choosing. At twenty-two, I left because remaining had become dangerous. Last year, I left because I had acquired the authority to recognize the conditions taking shape around me and to refuse them.

After making that decision, I contacted my Tía Yoli through Facebook. She had been present at my birth at the Hospital de Occidente. When she learned that my Honduran belonging had been questioned, she said that anyone was free to come and ask her. She knew exactly where they had incinerated what she called my belly button—the remnant of my umbilical cord—where they had placed it, and where it would not come back from.

Her statement was complicated, truthful, and loving at the same time.

She was not asking a nation to authorize my belonging. She was locating me within an embodied fact that preceded anyone’s judgment. Something of my body had been returned to the land where I was born and placed there permanently. I could leave, return, leave again, become a citizen elsewhere, refuse violence, and protect my life. None of those acts could undo where my body entered the world or where part of it remained.

Her words also carried the truth of rupture. What had been placed there would not come back. My relationship with Honduras could never become untouched or uncomplicated, nor could it recover everything migration and danger had interrupted. Yet distance did not turn origin into fiction. Refusal did not erase relationship.

Tía Yoli defended my belonging without requiring my submission. She did not tell me that I had to remain in Honduras, endure harm, provide money, or prove my loyalty. She simply named what she knew. She had been present at my birth. She knew where part of my body had been placed. No one could reverse that history.

At the end of the day, I am still standing upon the continuity of the landscape that is the Western Hemisphere. From where I stand now, I can draw a line of land, uninterrupted by ocean, to the place where I was born. I am farther north, within another country and another political life, yet I remain on the same continental body.

National borders divide jurisdictions, citizenships, economies, and political responsibilities. They do not sever the land beneath them. They do not place an ocean between my present life and my beginning. The line between California and Santa Rosa de Copán crosses borders, but it does not leave the hemisphere or break the continuity of the earth.

Part of my body was placed in Copán. The rest of my body now stands elsewhere upon the same connected landscape.

This is neither a claim of ownership nor an argument that borders and national differences are meaningless. Migration did not remove me from the larger terrain that holds both my birthplace and my present life. I remain within a hemispheric continuity that precedes the nations imposed upon it and exceeds the categories through which those nations decide who belongs.

My life has moved through that continuity: from Copán to La Lima, from Honduras into the United States, and through the national, racial, cultural, and political formations that have attempted to tell me what each movement should mean. I have never crossed an ocean into an unrelated world. I have moved across a connected landscape shaped by Indigenous corridors, African displacement and reconstitution, colonial conquest, labor, migration, resistance, and the continual creation of relationship across borders.

The relatives who raised me gave me the tools I would need to live within this complexity. They did not present us as Maya Ch’orti’, nor did they give me a complete genealogy. They modeled and demanded respect for Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous peoples. They rooted me in the history and grief carried by our own relatives without teaching me that we needed to become another people in order to repair what had been lost to us.

They made sure I understood both the beauty these communities lived and created and the grief they were being required to carry. They also taught me that the losses carried among our relatives—languages no longer spoken, interrupted relationships to land, fragmented kinship, migration, and histories we could no longer fully reconstruct—created no entitlement to the collective continuities other peoples had preserved.

Our grief did not require us to become another. It required us to respect the peoples who had remained present as themselves.

In teaching me respect for others while rooting me in the history and grief carried by our relatives, the relatives who raised me gave me the tools I would later need to become a citizen of the United States while remaining Honduran. They taught me that entering another national life did not require the abandonment of the first. I could become a citizen of the United States without ceasing to come from Honduras. I could refuse conditions that endangered or diminished me without denying the country, people, and places that formed me. I could remain Honduran without using the cultures of other peoples to prove the authenticity of my belonging.

I do not need to enclose Garifuna or Maya inheritance within my national identity. I can carry my own history—love, migration, danger, estrangement, survival, return, grief, and refusal—without becoming another people.

This formation eventually enabled me to presence the existence of a Terrenal structural position.

The Terrenal is formed through the convergence of Indigenous and Black continuity, genocide, enslavement, dispossession, colonial mixture, migration, labor, resistance, and European inheritance across the Americas. It is neither another identity to assume nor a claim to membership or authority within any particular living people. It names a structural position from which descendants can become responsible for the histories carried within us while respecting the collective authority of peoples whose continuity remains living and distinct.

The Terrenal stands within the continuity of the hemisphere while carrying the ruptures created across it. We are formed by borders without being fully explained by them. We may carry several national relationships while remaining accountable to the distinct peoples, territories, and histories through which the hemisphere continues to live.

The relatives who raised me did not give me the word Terrenal. I developed that language later. They gave me the ethical and relational formation through which I could recognize what the word needed to name. They taught me that a person can carry several worlds without collapsing them into one another. They taught me that belonging does not require possession, that migration does not have to end one relationship for another to begin, that respect for others does not require self-abandonment, and that grief can remain rooted in its own history rather than being resolved by taking from someone else’s.

My grandmother’s origin in Ocotepeque, my birth and earliest healing in Copán, and my upbringing in La Lima locate my life within several distinct Honduran terrains. These relationships are real. They do not make me Maya Ch’orti’ or grant me authority over Maya culture. They ground my responsibility without granting me possession.

I remain Honduran by history, formation, relationship, and responsibility. I am also a citizen of the United States. These relationships coexist within a body still standing upon the uninterrupted landscape of the Western Hemisphere.

The borders have changed my political location. They have not broken the land beneath my life.

The continuity of the landscape also allows me to see a continuity of power. Here in the United States, immigrant communities are living under an expanding apparatus of ICE arrests, detention, transfer, removal, and fear. People who have raised children, worked, built communities, and created lives here can be pursued and recast as threats through the administrative language of immigration enforcement.

I became a citizen of the United States within a nation that can recognize the belonging of one immigrant while organizing the persecution of another. Citizenship does not release me from that contradiction. It places me inside it and gives me greater responsibility for what this country does in my name.

My right to remain cannot be separated ethically from the danger imposed upon those whose presence is being criminalized. The formation that prepared me to become a citizen of the United States while remaining Honduran also prepared me to understand that belonging secured through the exclusion and persecution of others is incoherent.

I know what it means for a country to become unable or unwilling to hold a life safely. I cannot accept a system that requires other people to prove their deservingness through detention, separation from their relatives, fear, endurance, or disappearance from the lives of those who love them.

Many of the people pursued by ICE have traveled across the same connected landscape upon which I stand. They have crossed borders, languages, political systems, and conditions of danger only to encounter another apparatus determining whether they may remain, whether their relatives may remain together, and whether their lives will be recognized as worthy of protection.

This is a reality of persecution here.

The same connected landscape also carries a reality of persecution there. The forces operating here and there are neither identical nor separate. They are increasingly joined through a hemispheric security architecture that governs movement, territory, belonging, and resistance across national borders.

The land beneath us is continuous, and so are the consequences we are being asked to carry.

In my next reflection, I will turn toward the appropriation of Garifuna culture, the assault upon Garifuna territory, and the Shield of the Americas. I will also ask immigrant communities to transform the power and resources we have developed here into material support for OFRANEH and the National Mayan Weavers Movement.

The future of the hemisphere will be determined in part by whether we allow the forces of control to coordinate across borders while the peoples living their consequences remain separated from one another.

Continuity asks something different of us.