My Uncle Juan jokingly offered up an ingenious portmanteau to define our racially and culturally complex family: “We’re red Ricans,” he said, “—a mix of redneck and Puerto Rican.” In a way, this might be the most accurate description of my family’s blended cultural identity. As a woman of Puerto Rican descent who grew up in the Deep South, my work is woven from a multitude of different voices enriched by many different cultures. My father was the son of Alabama sharecroppers, and so that is a very different culture from the one my mother came from, but both shared a common experience of growing up poor in the South.