Pat Conway 
Fusion [EPUB ebook] 

In the border area between the United States and Mexico, life is like a tossed salad. This salad is like avocados, salsa, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots and whatever else the cook thinks might go well – maybe some squash or some grated cheese. Though people from everywhere call this home, the three predominant ethnic groups are anglos, Hispanics, and Native Americans. It is a place of fusion where people mix everything – food, language, marriage, religion, politics, and family life.

It’s a place where you can get an American hamburger and a Mexican Tecate beer one time and green chile enchiladas and a Coke the next. Out here you can go to a festival of La Virgin de Guadalupe one weekend and a wine tasting with jazz musicians the next, and nobody thinks that’s strange. Most of our ancestors came from Europe, bringing with them the languages and customs of Ireland, Spain, and England. Some of them are Spanish Catholics, some with a strain of Judaism hidden somewhere back there from the expulsions of the Inquisition. And the descendents of those Tigua Indians here who rebelled against the Spaniards up in New Mexico keep their ancient culture alive while going about the business of being Americans.

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Pat Conway grew up speaking Spanish and English on a cotton farm south of El Paso, Texas. She retired in 1996 from thirty-two years of teaching high school English and Creative Writing. Pat is a Fellow of the West Texas Writing Project. She has had poems and stories published in ‘Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Border’s; ‘Treasured Poems of America, Fall 1997’; and in Mesilla Valley Writers’s publication ‘Crossroads.’ Her chapbook of poetry ‘Doorways’, was published in 2007. She won second place in the 2010 national poetry writing contest sponsored by Eber & Wein Publishing.

Here writings reflect the lives of people in the borderland between the United States and Mexico as seen through the eyes of the anglo experience in its interactions with the Mexican-American community.

Pat lives in Good Samaritan retirement community in Las Cruces, NM where she facilitated a writing group for several years. She has one daughter, Katherine, and enjoys facilitating classes and writing.