A Mexican State of Mind showcases the creative endeavors of Mexicans in New York City, many of whom are undocumented. How did you start working on this project?
I actually started it [as a graduate student]at Fordham. Even though I was studying English, [the program]gave me so much space to explore other interests, [so]I took a course on sociology and minorities, and for my final project I did an ethnography about Mexican hip-hop. After Fordham, I reworked it and presented it at a conference, and there was a lot of interest. And then I worked on it more, looking at graffiti and other art forms, while I was also working in restaurants amongst some of these same people, [the artists featured in my research]. And then I kept working on it for my Ph.D. at Yale. I just felt their stories needed to be told, and I was in a unique position to tell them.

So how did your identity as a Mexican-American poet play into that unique perspective?
I think I saw, as an artist and restaurant worker, how I was treated differently than undocumented people or people perceived as undocumented because of their skin color. But to me what was most amazing was, despite these hardships and marginalizations, they were fighting for creative lives. I think that’s what’s most important. There’s such a focus on what undocumented people lack—rights, health care, education, employment stability. But what do they bring to the world? Obviously they bring their labor, but beyond that—we need to think of them as three-dimensional human beings with creative lives and interests. They’re forming collectives, they’re forming sometimes transnational and multinational networks. They’re shaping and creating culture.

Two concepts you touch on in the book are how we view migrants versus immigrants, and the idea of a mobile borderlands. What do you mean by each of those?
I like to think about my subjects—many of whom are my friends now, I have tattoos done by them on my body—as migrants instead of immigrants. That’s because I want to emphasize two-way mobility, and movement as a human right. It also shifts the idea of immigrants as “invaders” just coming into a country. We’re all potential migrants. And for the borderlands piece, I wanted to take Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the U.S.-Mexico border as a wound that causes both pain and creativity out of the traditional Southwest borderlands where it originated and think of it in a New York context, where Mexicans are coming up against not just white people but some of the most diverse populations in the world. How does that multinational world change their creativity? I think it affects the type of culture they produce. They embrace, for example, the history of hip-hop in New York City as well as international sounds and people. It changes their interactions, their experience, and their creative work.

How did your subjects feel about being featured in the book?
They were all down for it. One of the things I always remember that one of them said was, “Dejamos una huella que estuvimos aquí,” or “We are leaving a mark that we were here.” And I think they saw I could help them leave that mark—because these are vulnerable populations; many of them could be deported at any time. And they care that there’s something to show for their time in New York. I did get some feedback on the book—I asked them how they felt about how I was representing them—and it was always positive. But they would say you could highlight this more, or this. It’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever written, with new ways to think about diaspora, transnationalism, Mexican studies … but I didn’t want it to be too academic-y. They helped me bring out some on-the-ground theory. I can’t wait to give them copies.

How do you create the same space for new voices in your classroom?
I think it’s really important for students to see themselves in the authors they’re reading. If students can see themselves in the curriculum, I hope they feel empowered by it. So I bring in a number of Latino or African American authors, many of them living authors, often from the Bronx. You have to widen the canon. But there’s also the canon within the canon. The Latino canon is marginalized within the American literature canon, but the Afro-Latino canon is marginalized within that. Many of these students experience racism within their own communities. There is colorism, or people think they’re not Latino because of the color of their skin. I want them to know there’s a body of literature that talks about these issues. And we’re not just talking about issues of race but also issues of sexuality. I want them to think on their own, to challenge ideas, to think of themselves as scholars who can have a voice about what the future of the canon is going to be.

How does your poetry address some of these same issues?
A lot of my poetry explores where I fit in. I don’t identify as fully white or fully Mexican, because each negates the other half. I will never give an identity to anybody else. I think we need to stop labeling people, and start letting people identify how they want to identify and let those identities evolve. Identity is transformable; it changes across generations and lifetimes. I’ve watched students who are half white like me read Latino literature in my own classroom and have that part of their identity become something very powerful for them. I want to create that space for people like that, and I hope my poetry does that as well. People feel out of place for different reasons, so I hope that can resonate for whoever feels like that.

What are you working on next?
I have a draft of my next poetry book, called Chingona Rules, that I’m editing. I’m working on a book about Afro-Latino literary history from the 1930s and 1940s, which also came out of my studies at Fordham. And then I’m working on a book with my husband, Tony Planas, about the psychological repercussions of long-term detention on children. He’s a reporter, so he will take the lead on interviews and I will take the lead on research. He’s also a photographer, and he’s taken pictures that I’ve written poems for. It’s cool, because this is a new way to collaborate for us. And to bring more voices to the forefront.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Alexandra Loizzo-Desai.

Montoya, a psychotherapist who earned a master’s degree in social work at Fordham in 2005, had been organizing a closet in her New York City apartment while a Colombian TV station played in the background. She had grown up in Bogotá with an aunt and uncle who are fraternal twins and cousins who are identical triplets, so the topic of twins has always piqued her interest. But this report—about twins discovering at age 25 that one in each pair had been accidentally switched as babies—seemed too improbable to be true.

It was no soap opera. The Bernal Castro brothers, Jorge and Carlos, had been raised as fraternal twins in cosmopolitan Bogotá, while the Cañas Velasco brothers, Wilber and William, had been raised as fraternal twins on an isolated farm near La Paz. Neither set turned out to be biologically related. Through the detective work of mutual friends, it came to light that William and Carlos had been separated from their identical brothers, most likely in the hospital nursery. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” said Montoya, a licensed clinical social worker and the associate director of advising at Columbia University’s School of Social Work. “I couldn’t stop thinking this has to be a study.”

Because identical twins share 100 percent of their genes, they provide valuable information about genetic and environmental influences for medical and psychological research. The Colombian twins were even more ideal as research subjects since the two sets had been raised in starkly different settings, which opened a fascinating window into how identities are shaped by nature and nurture.

A Rare Research Opportunity

Though they’d never met, Montoya decided to contact Nancy Segal, Ph.D., a psychologist and behavioral geneticist known for her groundbreaking research on twins. Over the course of six rapid-fire emails, they decided to join forces on an extraordinary research project that resulted in the new book Accidental Brothers: The Story of Twins Exchanged at Birth and the Power of Nature and Nurture. Until the Colombia case, there had been only seven recorded instances of switched-at-birth twins. This was the first known case of two sets of identical twins being split up, reared apart, and then reunited as adults.

A practicing psychologist in Bogotá, Montoya came to the U.S. in 2001 to study at the English Language Institute at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia. Missing big-city life, she moved to New York to attend Fordham. After graduation, she worked in varied settings as a clinical social worker, including with immigrant families and with September 11 rescue, recovery, and cleanup workers.

It took all of Montoya’s clinical skills, compassion, and resourcefulness to conduct the twin study. Segal laid out what she would need to do, which included personality questionnaires, health histories, IQ tests, more DNA tests, individual interviews, and small group discussions. In December 2014, she flew to Bogotá to meet the twins and ask them to participate in a study. They said yes.

A Tale of Two Upbringings

Jorge and Carlos were raised by a single mother and her close-knit family in a working-class neighborhood in Bogotá. Both attended good public schools and went on to college, where Jorge studied mechanical engineering and Carlos studied finance. Wilber and William grew up 150 miles from Bogotá on a farm with no running water or electricity. They attended school until they were 11, walking an hour each way over rough terrain. Then they worked full time on the farm. After compulsory military service, they worked at a butcher shop in Bogotá. That’s where a woman spotted William and mistook him for his identical twin, Jorge, her friend and co-worker. That encounter led the four to discover the truth, that the twins who grew up together weren’t twins at all—they weren’t even related.

The revelation upended their lives. Jorge and Wilber, who grew up with their biological families, worried about losing the close ties with the twins they’d grown up with. William pondered the hardships of his rural upbringing and the more difficult path he took to get an education. He eventually passed the high school equivalency exam and enrolled in law school in 2016.

Carlos grappled with the unanswerable question of what he’d be doing today if he’d grown up on the farm. And both William and Carlos dealt with the profound emotions that accompanied meeting new biological relatives as well as the fears that relationships with non-biological family members would change. In short, they were overwhelmed.

Brothers from Another Mother

In the spring of 2015, Montoya and Segal spent 10 days with the twins in Colombia. The most eye-opening part of the trip was a visit to the farm—not only for the research team but also for city slickers Jorge and Carlos. To reach the farm required a grueling hourlong trek through knee-deep mud. This was the key to understanding how much Wilber and William overcame to achieve what they had, Montoya said.

“When they experienced that, it was admiration for these children who had to do that walk twice a day in order to get a fifth-grade education,” she said.

After working with the twins, which way did Montoya lean—toward nature or nurture? Do genetics or environment matter more when it comes to upbringing and personality development? “I don’t think I’m into one versus the other,” she said, pointing to the book’s subtitle. “That’s why we use the ‘and’—nature and nurture.”

Montoya has been impressed by the resilience of the twins. All four refer to each other as brothers, even Wilber and Jorge, who have no familial or biological ties. Instead of focusing on the trauma of the situation, they’ve chosen to concentrate on what they’ve gained.

“They are really amazing muchachos,” she said.

—Mariko Thompson Beck is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and a frequent contributor to this magazine.

Q. What inspired your interest in the public expression of emotion?

 I got interested in public emotions through those informal shrines on the streets of my city neighborhoods that began in the late 20th century. All over the city but across the country too, people would leave candles and flowers for someone who had died and I said to myself, “This is something different, something important.” The first time historically that the country did this for a public person was after JFK’s assassination, a highly mediatized event where Dealey Plaza became a place where people wanted to go to remember and to mourn. Many years later, was the death of Princess Diana. Kensington Palace was covered with flowers and people came from all over the world. And again, in the days after 9/11, the posting of photos of the “missing” all over Grand Central and Penn Station. That this grew and expanded as a cultural practice, both locally and on the media, interested me a great deal.

Q. Your book ties emotional change to contemporary performance theory. How so?

Today, many of us dramatize our connection to a death or a tragedy. There’s something different about how we express our emotions—we do this in a public way, take and post photos or videos. It’s new. I grew up in the fifties and there was a formality and restraint to things you did if someone died, right? Even if it was a tragic death.

In short, I think that contemporary life is making actors of all of us. But not in a false, phony sense; rather, in the sense that we want to act things out that we know with conviction and that we feel strongly. This doesn’t mean that we’re overly scripted in what we do. It means that we want to dramatize things and express what we feel with other people in public places in much the same way that actors do; it’s an argument I make in this book.

Q. Don’t some theorists question whether that is real emotion?

I don’t go there in this book, but I do engage my students in those kind of questions. Whether these are real emotions or not, I see an awful lot of people talking today about being “authentic” and pursuing authentic lives and I think this indicates something important about culture and emotion today. For example, I see an authenticity in my students when they talk about the primacy of emotions in their lives. And that impresses me. As a sociologist, I have to listen to them, to pay attention to what they and other people tell me about the meaning of emotions today.

 Q. What is the main argument of your book?

Well, my argument is about the identity of the modern self in history and how many things about being a person have changed today. Whether we think about the person in the 16th century, or the 18th, or the 21st, we meet different kinds of persons with different kinds of experiences and ideas about what a person is, what feelings mean, and so forth.

To sum up: we are cultural and collective beings whose emotions are shaped by the lives we live with others. So my book’s about the changing emotional cultures of the modern and postmodern age. Some of these changes have deep roots in our past, like individualism and Romanticism. Other changes have to do with the economies and digital technologies of today and how these, too, are changing us.