Career Narrative

Querida Comadre,

Today is one of those days that Monica sings about, when all my losses visit me in a looping synesthetic hologram like a shadow resume. I think about my father, of course, but also every single other person I’ve lost along the way, either through death, job loss, ever-growing distance, or simple nervous system incompatibility.

Yesterday I attended an information session for a big artist award and, besides the odds, what stuck with me was the phrase “Career Narrative.” As a ladder climber, I have kept my resume and letters of recommendation current over the years, but as my list of achievements grows, there are diminishing returns and a clear lack of opportunities for an over-educated worker with a background in labor advocacy.

We exist in a dominant economy where rote operations and unquestioned compliance are increasingly preferred by employers over dynamic critical thinking skills and leadership qualities.

Previously, the operations manuals I’ve gifted to employers in my many administrative roles, were celebrated by bosses; today, however, they are received as insubordination and I am escorted to the door with a retaliatory written warning.

I’m now just perceived as an uppity Norteña, who’s gotten too big for my britches.

It gives me endless satisfaction to take chaos, synthesize it, and organize it into an almost universally accessible instruction manual, like the kind I used as a diesel mechanic in the military—”dummy proof.” This is what makes me a writer.

As the fires continue to rage in my high desert homeland, my brain keeps working, futilely, to make sense of the scale of our human-caused—or, let’s call the Anthropocene what it is, greed-caused—global problems. I can’t cohere a hopeful narrative. It just comes apart in my hands as I try to stitch words and ideas together.

We’re so vigilant about protecting ourselves from something as petty as discomfort. Globally, there are violent efforts to keep US Americans from facing the awkwardness of hypocrisy, complicity, and the stubborn unsustainable quality of our lifestyles.

Having worked in nonprofit management for a decade, I have come to believe that everyone needs a mission statement, guiding principles for our lives. My own values cohered in the tough caliche of Northern New Mexico, giving me a unique angle to study our nation as a changeable concept. I don’t see in black or white, to the frustration of many US Southeasterners. As a coyote, my existence is subversion.

The values that continually emerge as most salient to my personal mission statement are: transparency, accountability, communication, sustainability, and integrity. These are my sincerely held beliefs. Each value has its own backstory, hard lessons learned over 43 years; these values are woven together into a protective soldier’s uniform I wear with pride.

On an ROTC field trip to Corpus Christi in high school, we coyote Norteños got in trouble with some retired white GIs when we walked into a gas station with our Class A shirts partially open, revealing our ribbed tanks underneath. My hair was probably down as well. They called us “disrespectful.” Through my cultural lens, they were the disrespectful ones. I’m guided by different values than compliance.

I left the Army National Guard as a conscientious objector to the Iraq War because I no longer wanted to be objectified as government property without rights to political beliefs. Nowadays, employers want that same level of obedience from civilians; they want us scrubbed clean of ideology and culture, whitewashed into a nebbish aesthetic.

My teaching mentor Paul Tatter with neweducation.org tells me, regarding his own sacred attention and labor, he just gives “it all away for free.” I’ve come to the same conclusion after fighting fruitlessly for sustainable work and a living wage my whole adult life. One of my myriad reasons for joining the military at age 17 was having a vocation that offered me financial independence from men, a goal that is increasingly out of reach for many gender nonconforming mothers.

All my most fulfilling experiences have been as a volunteer, where my work is not bound by transactional and exploitative agreements. My soul is not for sale.

Maybe someday I’ll get paid for my writing or maybe I can become the NC Triad’s leading typewriter mechanic.

I’m listening to Mathias Duplessy. What are you listening to?

Con cariño,

Petra

P.S.
As of today, the Frijoles Fire in Northern New Mexico has grown to 8,196.8 acres with 0% containment. Please pray for rain.

©2026 by Petra Salazar for Coyote Pedagogy. These writings come from lived experience, ancestral memory, research, and imagination. Please share only by linking back to the source—not by appropriating. Thank you for honoring the creative commons of heart and story.