When Giving is All We Have

In highlighting the importance of transcending boundaries and fusing artificial divisions into a new community, Rios’s poem is an example of transborder literature. 

Unlike immigrant literature that examines the dynamics of assimilation—how one cultural identity surrenders to and is lost within the adopted culture—transborder literature focuses on the challenge of two cultures existing simultaneously. In transborder works, individuals wrestle with being both and neither. 

Rios, raised in a first-generation Mexican immigrant family along the Mexico–US border, writes often about the internal challenges facing those immigrants who maintain close ties geographically and culturally with Mexico while trying to establish an identity in their adopted country, as well as the external dark pressures of xenophobia and bigotry. 

Mexican American transborder themes date back to the literature of the late-19th-century Gilded Age, as the US wrestled with the political ramifications of its contested border with Mexico. 

More recently, poets Natalee Diaz and Juan Felipe Herrera, journalists Charles Bowden and Sam Quinones, and novelists Denise Chaves and Leslie Marmon Silko have used transborder literature to explore the contemporary effects of this cultural tension. Rios’s 2015 collection A Small Story about the Sky, in which “When Giving Is All We Have” appears, is regarded as a landmark work of 21st century transborder literature.