This One is For My Fellow Latinxs

My interview with El Mundo, a premier newspaper in Spain

David Mejía, a Professor of Philosophy in Madrid, Spain, recently interviewed me for El Mundo, a Spanish newspaper.

The interview was published in Spanish.

Though I am half latinx/latine by ancestry (my biological father was Mexican), I can only speak a bit of broken Spanglish as a result of growing up in California with lots of Mexican friends.

You can read the English translation of my interview below:

The Sunday magazine of EL MUNDO

Robert K. Henderson's childhood and youth were not easy. His memoirs, *Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class* begin like this: “My name is Robert Kim Henderson. Each of my three names was taken from a different adult. These three adults have something in common: they all abandoned me.” Robert is the name of his biological father, whom he never knew; Kim is the surname of his biological mother, a young South Korean student consumed by drug addiction. Rob retains memories of living in a car and later in a gloomy apartment where his mother tied him to a chair to drug herself in peace. Rob was three years old when his mother was arrested, and he entered the foster care system in Los Angeles County. Shortly after, his mother was deported. He has never seen her again. Henderson is the surname of his adoptive father, who decided to remove him from his life when the couple divorced. Rob went through several foster homes until he was adopted by the Hendersons. With them, his life improved, but he continued to fail, consume, and get into fights. His survival instinct led him to enlist in the army after finishing high school. He learned discipline, rehabilitated, and was able to study at university. Today he is a Yale graduate and holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge, has a column in *The Boston Globe*, and a newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers. His intellectual concerns, well condensed in the concept of "luxury beliefs," are inseparable from this improbable life trajectory narrated in a book that is already a bestseller in the United States.

Mejía: One of the most important theses in the book is that a family's income level is not as important as its stability.

Henderson: At Yale, there were many discussions about poverty and inequality, and I remember moments of scarcity as a child, but I have long been skeptical of the idea that material factors are the most important predictors for life outcomes. I have seen people with similar economic conditions take very different paths.