I discovered magical realism when I was sixteen, the same summer I began a correspondence with my Colombian father. Up to that point, I had lived entirely removed from my birthplace in Colombia. It was the 1980s and I was growing up in the bubble of my single mother’s family, going to school in the mainly white suburbs surrounding the Twin Cities, and spending summers at my white American grandparents’ isolated cabin in the northern woods of Minnesota. This world couldn’t have been more distant from my father and my origins in South America.

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By the time I was in high school, all I knew about him was that he lived far away and was an artist; all I knew about Colombia came from the terrifying news stories of kidnappings and guerrillas in the early 1990s, when it was the most dangerous country on earth. I compared these facts with the grainy photos I found in my mother’s albums.…