El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ¿Lo mejor? It’ll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tía, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone).

On trips back to the campo where my parents grew up, and where I spent the first few years of my life, I rarely need to introduce myself. Many stop me on my way to the colmado or a relative’s house to ask, “¿Y es que tú no te acuerdas de mi?” But I never do recognize them. I left when I was a toddler, so while they see a lineage in my face — my mother’s eyes, my father’s nose — they are strangers to me.

And while my aunts, who grew up carrying bath water in buckets from the river and walking around barefoot in the grass, can name all the flowers (framboyán, buganvilla, cayena) in the vast, lush backyard of their childhood , I have to ask questions, taking notes on my iPhone so I can learn to describe this place .

For an immigrant (or a descendant of one) growing up in America, it can be difficult to determine when or where one’s story begins. Many feel groundless and displaced, existing between two cultures and languages. The Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa described this feeling as a third space, the “borderlands,” in her groundbreaking work of feminist and cultural theory, “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” A common refrán puts it more plainly: ni de aquí, ni de allá (neither from here, nor from there).