When Cosme Aguilar was a boy growing up in the mountainous, warm Mexican city of Cintalapa, Chiapas — before he immigrated to the United States and opened a Mexican restaurant that would earn a Michelin star — he used to help his family make barbacoa on Sundays.

He remembers the visceral aspects of it: the flies. The blood. The butchering and cleaning. How each of his five siblings participated and all worked together. The next morning, under his mother’s careful tending, the barbacoa would transform inside the clay oven on the patio, from a pile of sinew into a rich, smoky meat that fell off the bone.

Why am I still allowing this? Why do I still answer the white editors who come to me this time of year, like they always do? To agree to this exchange, to say “yes” to my sense that I'm only considered valuable during Cinco de Mayo or Hispanic Heritage Month feels gross. Me da asco. And yet here I am. Because hopefully, writing this will pay for the other writing I truly want to do. And because I need to write what feels scary and hard.

The reality, on a given night at our house, is that I will have to shoo my toddler out of the kitchen at least three times because she will have grabbed the paring knife, begged me for yet another string cheese, or dumped a bucket of toys next to the oven just when I need to put the sheet pan in. Usually, at the exact moment in a recipe when it’s time to vigorously stir a sauce, this wonderful little sprite announces that she needs to use the bathroom. One evening when I was at the stove, I heard the eldest shout, “You’re not supposed to pee on the rug!”