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I rescued a chocolate lab, named him Choco, and he has become my companion and best friend. I began to grow pineapple, mango, and papaya from seed in the garden. I filled it with hand crafted furniture made by a carpenter who lives down my street, and art painted by my friends in Mexico City. I decided to buy a fully restored, 100-year old house about a 10-minute walk from the beach. On my birthday, three months after I arrived, I put faith in that feeling. I felt connected to the flavors, to the land, and to the vibrant community that flourishes on that tropical coast. But every day that went by I fell a little more in love with the city with its kind and generous people with the cool Pacific waves crashing on rocky beaches and, of course, with the seafood-among the sweetest shrimp and lobster I have eaten anywhere in the world. I had no intention of staying in Mazatlán when I arrived on March 19, 2020, planning to hole up for just a few weeks-until the pandemic had passed, I thought. When I realized we’d be entering lockdown, I drove eight hours to the first major city on the open Pacific, Mazatlán. and Mexico, I was in the middle of the desert in Coahuila. In March 2020, when the pandemic fully hit the U.S. Just as I was inching closer to finding what I'd come for, the world turned upside down. I hadn’t found a place that felt like it was mine I hadn't found my place in Mexico. Still missing though, was the personal sense of belonging that I expected-that I desperately wanted. I had found the flavors of my childhood and I had found people who look like me. It might have been enough to head home with. It was like being at a wedding and bumping into relatives I hadn’t seen in years I didn’t remember their names, but I knew their faces. I then walked through the mercado-and everyone I saw looked familiar. I sat there frozen, tears welling in my eyes at the striking resemblance. She turned toward me and my heart sank: She looked exactly like a photo of my mother when she was the same age. There was a little girl, about three years old, in a little white dress and black Mary Jane shoes, dancing between her parents. I parked and walked the cobblestone streets of the Spanish colonial plazas, eventually sitting on a bench and watching a family play in front of me. There is no real gay district in Austin as the city at large is. The gay community in the city is out, open and proud and visitors will notice the prominence of the LGBT+ population here. As such, it attracts vast numbers of LGBT+ individuals from around Texas and the USA. That changed a few days later, when I drove into Saltillo, Coahuila, about an hour southwest of Monterrey. Austin is a liberal paradise within a socially conservative state. I'd found one part of the puzzle in Monterrey, but there were still missing pieces. I have more of my maternal grandfather’s features-darker hair, darker skin, darker eyes, sharper features in my face, more moreno (brown). They looked a lot like my dad’s side of the family: The Martínez’s are light skinned and have lighter hair than my mother’s side, the Castruitas. A street view in Capula, Michoacán Ren Fullerīut the thing was, the people in Monterrey didn’t look like me.