Other Lives Our Own

In Other Lives Our Own (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) Jason Weiss reflects on travel, language, memory, identity, and the stories we inherit and create. This conversation explores how we inhabit each other's stories, tracing how movement across places and languages reshapes our understanding of self and belonging. Drawing on experiences in New York, Paris, Mexico, California and beyond, Weiss reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, the shifting nature of home, and the limits of labels such as "American."

Weiss reveals his gift for uncovering meaning in overlooked moments. He reflects on the value of curiosity, attentiveness, and recognizing significance in experiences that often go unnoticed. Whether discussing art, literature, family history, or everyday encounters, he argues that "in all our experiences there is more meaning than we normally give them."

This conversation includes Jason Weiss, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo.

Other episodes of the Nuevos Horizontes podcast with Jason Weiss include discussions of his books Listenings (in English and Spanish) and Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Literature in Paris.

The Instituto Nuevos Horizontes is housed at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.

Topics, scholars, books and quotes mentioned:

• Susan Beegel
• Aurora Levins Morales
• "I think it [home] is a moving perspective." -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo
• Heraclitus the Obscure
• "Where are you from? I think that changes." -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo
• "If you say, 'you're from here' - you're too conscious of all that's missing from that answer." -Jason Weiss
• "Parisian as a temporary designation felt right, as I enjoyed being a foreigner." -Jason Weiss
• The Paradox of Choice
• "Most things are like lightbulbs; they burnout and we throw them away" -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo
• John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
• Travel Writing
• "…lack curiosity about the ones who went away" (Other Lives Our Own 63).
• "Leaving disrupts a shared story, and the return doesn't quite fit the version of you they hold onto." -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
• "They thought [the US] was a land of boundless opportunities, not endless forgetting" (Other Lives our Own 37).
• "They didn't talk about the old country. The stuff to remember is predominantly not pleasant or they have that attitude that we have to look forward." -Jason Weiss on previous generations of Eastern European Jews
• "American culture has always been angled toward not remembering." -Jason Weiss
• "Myself, I find it complicated to work with [the word 'American']. But when you use it, I feel like I'm reading the cheeky, brilliant kid sitting in the back of the class, using it with all this other meaning." -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
• "Travel supercharged my desire to learn it [Spanish]." -Jason Weiss
• "It should be a requirement for everyone to know at least two languages...I think of it as a toolbox, it gives us the capacity to think in another way." -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo
• "Every American should have to study Spanish.” -Jason Weiss
• Anti-intellectualism in the US
• "[A title can be] a wink at the reader." -Jason Weiss
• Juanes, "A dios le pido"
• "In another place, we are always someone else and maybe also the same. A little disoriented, almost lost, unsure of what we know. We speak another tongue, and our own tongue becomes different too: a secret among strangers, possibly a trap" (Other Lives our Own 21).
• Louis Leroy
• Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise
• Bringing Back New Concepts to This Mad City, Caroline Hagood.
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• "The Gleaners and I," Agnès Varda
• "In all our experiences there is more meaning than we normally give them." -Jason Weiss
• "The crowd is at the Mona Lisa but in the room next door you see works that make you say. This is so great, how is no one looking at this? Those types of things are happening in our own lives." -Jason Weiss
• "UPR as a model for what US universities could do." -Jason Weiss
• "On the Puertoricanization of US Higher Ed," Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
• "…recognizing the otherness in yourself." -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo