This map is found in Hueco Tanks State Park northeast of El Paso. My ancestors, the Tigua of Ysleta del Sur, adopted this symbol, as a map for their destiny. Enslaved by the Spaniards after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, this splinter of the Tiwa were forced to build the mission in Ysleta. After hundreds of years, the Tiwa of Ysleta del Sur have managed to negotiate their identity amongst a Mexican cultural majority. According to the Tiwa legend, the last Tigua person of Ysleta del Sur will "follow" this map to the mother tribe, Isleta del Norte, in central New Mexico. I have often felt like the last Tigua as I was growing up. I always felt different from my immediate and extended family. Why did I like to read when none of my cousins did? Why did I like school so much? Why did I not care about girls and constantly stared at my tios and other men? Why did I hate being Mexican? Why did I not want to speak Spanish? What was this desire to leave El Paso and never come back? Now that I realize that my joteria is the beginning of my sitio y lengua. This arrow, which is supposed to be the Rio Grande as it from New Mexico to the U.S/Mexico/Texas border, is orienting me back towards El Paso. As John Rechy writes in the first chapter of City of Night, "But it must begin in El Paso...and it starts in the Wind." My orientation as a queer Indo-Chicano living with AIDS cannot start in any other place but the border, as City of Night and other queer Chicana/o novels take place, (The Rain God, Migrant Souls, Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders), for that space is a "Thirdspace" in every sense of Soja's definition. It is evocative of Gloria Anzaldua's crossroads and where the Camino Real intersects with the shifting Rio Grande. I am a product of that environment as I was born and raised less than a mile north of the rio. I am also a mistake. I should have died several times over the last 42 years. As an infant, I was not supposed to survive the leukemia with which I was diagnosed. I tried to commit suicide when I was 14 when I couldn’t reconcile my homoerotic desires. I almost died of AIDS-related pneumonia when I was 26. I shouldn't be here. But something is keeping me here in this firstspace of the material. The secondspace of the spirit world calls to me more frequently and more loudly. Something else is driving me to do the work that I feel compelled to do. The more I write, the more questions arise, rather than answers.