Jose Guadalupe de Leon (father) Hector de Leon (son) Several minutes before the clock hit the twenty-fourth hour, thirty-two days after Thanksgiving, fifteen days after his 70th birthday, two days after Christmas, four days before the new year, in 1999, my father took...

Recollections of Houston's historic Gulfgate Mall triggers memories of my younger brother's troubled existence, mental health, and a harrowing life altering incident which occurred a block away from the theater. Having lived the better part of my life in the Houston’s...

“I just want to leave a committed life behind”. That is a pronouncement from Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) which was seared in my mind the moment I read it when I was 16-years of age. It was a sentence in an excerpt of King’s Drum Major Instinct sermon which I stumbled...

Lessons That Outlive a Professor_HoustonChronicle_7-23-2006 (This essay has been edited since it appeared in the Houston Chronicle Editorials on July 21, 2006.) My favorite professor died in 2006. His name was Ross Lence. He taught political theory at the University...

When I lost my father, I was terribly shaken. I felt that a part of me had perished. I felt very vulnerable and very mortal. My sense of security vanished because the shield between me and all my fears was gone. It felt like I was five years old again and I was lost...

A wrinkled fading black and white copy of Rafael Palafox’s Certificate of Naturalization shows he was 24-days short of his sixty-eighth birthday when he suddenly passed away. I found it in my mail basket. It was made to serve as “In Case of an Emergency”...

(José Raúl de León [García] at different stages of his life: “Pepe.”) “My Dad is the most talented man that I know,” his daughter lovingly expressed on a family Zoom call. As a teenager, he was “hanging ten” on his skateboard and surfboard before Tony Hawk made...

In the fall of 2014, as the number of unaccompanied children illegally crossing into the United States surged, there were calls to quickly send them home. I began to think about the idea of home and what it means from the immigrant child perspective. I asked, "If I...

Cuando perdí a mi padre estaba terriblemente conmovido. Sentí que una parte de mí murio. Me sentía muy vulnerable y muy mortal. Se sentía como si tenía cinco años y estaba perdido en un lugar publico. Sin el escudo contra mis temores, mi sensación de seguridad...

Para la mayoría de niños su madre es lo único constante en sus vidas. El momento en que murió mi madre me hizo reflexionar sobre esta realidad. Hasta la edad de 10 años yo vivía con mi madre en México mientras mi padre vivía en los EE.UU. Una vez que llegué...