He thought Phyllicia was too racially sensitive, and called her paranoid on more than one occasion. She says he was self-hating and ignorant. After he graduated from business school – long after they had broken up –  he moved to South Africa to pursue economic opportunities in emerging markets (“the way maggots pursue feeding opportunities in dead cows” Phyllicia says) and married a very light skinned woman there, a local beauty queen working as a manicurist.

Somewhere in Angleton, I’m waist deep in a pond, looking for a dying giant water lily though I can barely see two feet in front of me. 

At nine feet wide, the lily made the front page of our local paper in Harlingen, a small, neglected Texas town five hours away from Angleton. It was a change from reading about the Matas’ feud with Los Reyes Magos cartel and the fire sales of farms across the Rio Grande Valley. For a town going nowhere, we cultivate a lot of news.

The four of us live on the rooftop, in the azotea of the building where we work. It's a four story building in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood in Mexico City. There are four families in the building: a family on each floor, a maid for each apartment. One María for each family.