So, from cages to trucking--why, you may be asking. The purpose of my blogs are to move forward and not to go back in time, but I understand that some backstory is necessary to understand my mission, which is to advocate for prison reform.

In 1983, at twenty-one years of age, I was incarcerated, found guilty, given the maximum sentence allowed by law, and sent to Leavenworth maximum security penitentiary where I was not only one of the youngest convicts at the institution, but I was the only first-time, non-violent offender that I knew about. I was a young Colombian caught up in the middle of Ronald Reagan's war on drugs.

After finishing my sentence in 1994, at the age of thirty-four, I was deemed deportable by US immigration. I was kicked out the country and separated from my family.

In 2016, I found out that I had been a United States citizen since April of 1978 when I was teenager, and before I had briefly been an Airman in the United States Air Force. I had failed in my due diligence to investigate the law.

I went to claim my citizenship at the United States embassy, but instead of a certificate, I was incarcerated, kicked out of another country for the second time in my life, and separated from my partner and our son. I was extradited back to the United States and imprisoned again. The wreckage of my past had come to haunt me, yet again.

I was released on July 7th of 2017 on the weekend between the Fourth of July and the MLB All-Star game when downtown could not have been more dressed in Red, White and Blue...and there I was walking a free man and an American for the first time in 34 years, two months and eleven days.

When the Cdovid-19 pandemic hit, I lost my job and got into trucking. To fill my off duty time, I decided to take a few on-line college courses and some writing courses. Trucking took me to writing and now writing is moving me forward to helping organizations working on prison reform and/or advocacy for the unjustly deported. Before I get to my goal, however, my writing has to become somewhat sustainable. I need more time to write.

My backstory contains the grief of the mass incarcerated, the shattered dreams of the deported, and the broken hearts of those separated from their families. But that's not what I concentrate on in life, nor is talking about my past my mission. I'll write a book about that. My mission is to keep on truckin' and see where writing takes me. This blog, I hope, will keep me on track and moving forward into the light, not backwards into the darkness.

PS: it's also my first attempt at making a website, so bear with me.