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For young people who don't succeed in high school, joining the military can seem like a good option, particularly when there are few other job prospects.

But Dejanique "Daisy" Armstrong, a young, gay woman from Stockton, Calif., never planned to enlist in the Army. She ultimately made that choice as a last resort.

Armstrong had a lot of problems as a teen. At one point, she lived in a shelter with her mom. She really didn't like school.

"There were few teachers that I felt like cared about me, and those teachers got all of my attention, got all of my energy," Armstrong says. "But the ones who didn't, I gave no effort."

She switched schools six times to find the right fit. It didn't work. Her GPA hovered around 2.0 and she began cutting class.

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Armstrong is now a military police officer stationed at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. She recited her poem "My Soldier's Creed" at her basic training graduation. Courtesy of Anita McMillan hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Anita McMillan

Armstrong is now a military police officer stationed at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. She recited her poem "My Soldier's Creed" at her basic training graduation.

Courtesy of Anita McMillan

Her mother, Donna Armstrong, didn't approve, but she understood where Daisy was coming from.

"She felt like, you know, 'What am I going to school for if I'm really not learning anything? And if no one's passionate about me and who I am, then why does any of this matter?' " Donna Armstrong says.

And then one day, Donna Armstrong says, she "was looking through one of Daisy's journals, and saw that she was writing poetry."

She dragged Daisy to With Our Words, a youth poetry collective in Stockton. Armstrong quickly became a slam poetry star, winning first place in local and national competitions.

One of her prizes was a two-week poetry tour in the fall of 2012. She worked out a system for turning in her work online, but when she came back to school, her teacher had bad news.

"He just told me, 'You didn't do enough,' " Armstrong says. "And I was like, 'What? You dropped me from the program? Like, I'm not in high school? You're telling me I'm a high school dropout?' I felt so lost. I felt like I had no purpose."

Armstrong eventually got a high school diploma, and even housing, through a job training program — but then the funding was cut.

She didn't want to ask her parents for help, she says. "I didn't want to be anyone's burden. So the Army was the next step." Armstrong enlisted in March 2013. "I went straight to the recruiter and I was like, 'Yo, sign me up. Let's go.' "

Armstrong was afraid of going to war and of not belonging in the military because she was gay. But the Army promised a stable job and help with college tuition.

But first, she had to get through basic and technical training — more than four grueling months of physical tests and getting yelled at.

When she started, she says, "I couldn't do a pushup. I could not do one pushup, joining the Army. "

"We'd call her Army Strong, which is really funny, because when she first got there she struggled a lot," says Elizabeth Rogers, who trained with Armstrong.

To get through it, the recruits would write letters to family at night when they were supposed to be sleeping, Rogers says. Armstrong wrote letters, too — but she was also working on her poetry.

Daisy Armstrong performs her poem, "My Soldier's Creed" at a church she attended while serving in South Korea earlier this year.

"We'd pull out all our flashlights, and if the drill sergeant came through, we'd shove everything under our pillow and pretend to be asleep," Rogers says. "And I think while a lot of us were writing our letters home, [Daisy] was writing poems."

Typically, about 7 percent of Army recruits don't make it through basic training. And when Armstrong failed to pass a practice running test, she thought she might not make it, either.

"I stopped running and I started crying, and I was like, 'I'm not gonna graduate; we're four days away and I'm not going to graduate. Period.' "

Ultimately, though, Armstrong did pass all her tests, and she did graduate. To celebrate, she wrote a poem based on the Soldier's Creed: "Some say I'm army strong, I say the army made me strong," she wrote. "Like David with rock in hand I'm ready for giants."

Soon, lots of people on the base were talking about it, and a drill sergeant asked Armstrong's commander, Rachel Morgan, if Armstrong could perform it at graduation.

Morgan says she was initially a little concerned by the request. "In the military, we place a high amount of reverence on the Soldier's Creed and what it says and what it means to us," she says. "And I didn't want there to be any appearance that that might be disrespected."

But after hearing the poem, Morgan gave her approval.

"It wasn't about me standing out," Armstrong says. "It was about me finding my own groove and fitting in."

Armstrong is now a military police officer stationed at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. She doesn't know how long she'll stay in the Army, but she hopes to one day go to college and study psychology. In the meantime, she says, she'll keep writing poems.

This story was produced as part of Raise Up, a project of Youth Speaks in collaboration with AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio.

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If you want to give your taste buds a gustatory tour of Mexico, then Margarita Carrillo is ready to be your guide.

The Mexican chef and food activist has spent years gathering hundreds of recipes from every region of the country for Mexico: The Cookbook, her new, encyclopedic take on her country's cuisine.

With over 700 pages and 600 recipes, the book, at first glance, can be daunting. But most of the recipes are just a paragraph long, with prep and cook times under 20 minutes. That emphasis on simplicity was a deliberate choice: Carrillo wrote her book in hopes of encouraging American home cooks to explore Mexico's vast and varied, "labyrinthine" culinary bounty.

"Cook the simpler dishes first," she encourages readers in her introduction, "and then challenge yourself with the more elaborate ones."

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Margarita Carrillo, a Mexican chef and food activist, spent years gathering hundreds of recipes from every region of the country for Mexico: The Cookbook, her new, encyclopedic take on her country's cuisine. Courtesy of the author hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of the author

Margarita Carrillo, a Mexican chef and food activist, spent years gathering hundreds of recipes from every region of the country for Mexico: The Cookbook, her new, encyclopedic take on her country's cuisine.

Courtesy of the author

Carrillo is hardly the first cookbook author to try to document Mexico's regional cuisines exhaustively. Indeed, perhaps the best-known authority on the topic is Diana Kennedy, a British cookbook writer whose work has been recognized by the Mexican government with the Order of the Aztec Eagle.

"They've done it well," says Gloria Lopez Morales, president of the Conservatory of Mexican Gastronomical Culture, of the American and British food writers who have come before Carrillo. "But I think that now it's time for a Mexican cookbook of this caliber to be done by Mexicans."

The book includes recipes for 40 different salsas, 15 egg dishes and lots of street-food favorites. When I visited Carrillo recently at her home high in the hills above Mexico City, we decided to make a baked fish dish with a spicy, nutty marinade paste on top.

I asked Carrillo to slowly pronounce the name of the sauce — a smoked chili paste from Oaxaca made with nuts, dried shrimp, garlic, pumpkin seeds and dried avocado leaves. Chintextle, she repeats — "it's one of the energetic pastes," by which she means it's full of proteins.

All of the ingredients are dry-roasted in either a frying pan or a flat, cast-iron disk known as a comal.

She tosses the seeds into the hot frying pan. What about oil or water? I ask. She says, "You just want the frying pan with nothing, nothing at all on it."

One of the misconceptions Carrillo battles about Mexican food is that it is greasy and oily.

"In all of Mexico, there [are] the traditional cooking techniques — there is comal, steaming, boiling, hot stones and the pit," she insists. Oil and deep-frying, she says, are modern imports. Frying, she notes, "wasn't ours. It was brought to us by the Spaniards."

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Carrillo is the real deal. In a growing field of Mexican celebrity chefs, she insists on keeping it simple. There is no Asian or Mediterranean fusion in her cooking, no foam or fancy layers.

When editors with New York-based publisher Phaidon were looking for someone to add to their line of authentic, country-specific cookbooks, they went straight to Carrillo.

Lopez Morales says Phaidon had many great Mexican cooks to choose from. "But I believe that Margarita is one of the people with the most qualities necessary to write a truly authentic book about Mexican cooking," says Lopez Morales, whose nongovernmental agency is charged with promoting Mexican food as an "intangible cultural heritage" as designated by UNESCO.

Until recently, Carrillo owned restaurants in San Jose de Los Cabos and Mexico City. She has a popular cooking show on the Latin American Gourmet cable channel, and Carrillo was part of the decade-long campaign to get Mexican cuisine listed on the UNESCO cultural heritage list.

Carrillo says she wants everyone, Mexicans included, to appreciate the food and techniques that have survived generations and "made traditional Mexican cuisine an invaluable representation of a nation with a rich cultural identity."

"You know, it is really, really outstanding the way this food, this cuisine, has survived through the centuries. Of course, it evolves, but you can eat the same tortilla that Moctezuma ate 500 years ago," she says as she throws all of the dry-roasted ingredients into a food processor.

She adds some apple cider vinegar to smooth it all out. And in a clay baking dish, she lines the bottom with a splash of olive oil and some sliced onions, then places a fresh chunk of local robalo, or snook, a firm, flaky white fish. Carrillo says she gets riled that most Mexican restaurants serve imported salmon, when Mexico has thousands of miles of coastline.

"Why would we have to import fish? It is absurd," she says. "I think that Mexican cuisine is designed for Mexican products."

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Carrillo and NPR's Carrie Kahn cooked robalo, or local snook, a firm white fish, in chintextle, a smoked chili paste. Carrie Kahn/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Carrie Kahn/NPR

Carrillo and NPR's Carrie Kahn cooked robalo, or local snook, a firm white fish, in chintextle, a smoked chili paste.

Carrie Kahn/NPR

CHINTEXTLE

Smoked chili paste

Adapted from Mexico: The Cookbook by Margarita Carrillo Arronte

Region: Oaxaca

Preparation time: 20 minutes

Cooking time: 10 minutes

Serves: 6

Ingredients

5 Oaxacan pasilla or other smoked dried chilies, dry-roasted

3 1/2 oz/100 g dried shrimp (prawns)

6 avocado leaves

1/2 head garlic, roasted

1/2 cup (4 fl oz/120 ml) pineapple vinegar or apple cider vinegar

1/2 cup (4 fl oz/120 ml) olive oil

sea salt

Instructions

Preheat the broiler (grill), then broil (grill) the chilies, turning frequently, for 5 minutes. Remove and set aside. Broil the shrimp (prawns) under low heat for 2 minutes — broiling for longer will make them bitter. Remove and set aside.

Dry-roast the avocado leaves in a heavy frying pan or skillet over low heat for 2 to 3 minutes, until the leaves are a little shiny.

Put the chilies, shrimp, avocado leaves and garlic into a food processor or blender and process until thoroughly combined. With the motor running, add the vinegar and enough oil to make a spreadable paste. Season with salt.

Variation: You can add dry-roasted pumpkin seeds, pecans, almonds, guajillo chili, and cooked black beans.

Mexican food

foodways

Cameron Finucane, a burly, 26-year-old technology consultant in Ithaca, N.Y., started painting his nails a few months ago. He has just started dating Emily Coon, a 24-year-old writer who has sworn off nail polish.

Join The Conversation

Use the hashtag #newboom to join the conversation on social media.

Finucane and Coon, as well as many other millennials, say they find traditional notions of gender too confining, even ill-fitting. They are challenging the idea that men must dress a certain way, and women another. And they are rewriting the rules and refashioning clothes so that they can dress and accessorize in whatever way feels right to them.

More than two-thirds of people ages 14 to 34 agree that gender does not have to define a person in the way that it used to, according to a 2013 study conducted by the Intelligence Group, a consumer insights company. And 6 in 10 say that men and women do not need to conform to traditional gender roles or behaviors anymore.

Finucane always liked colors, he says. And one day, while watching his friend paint her nails, he decided he wanted to try, too. Nowadays, he almost always has his nails painted. He's done blue, yellow, pink. Finucane, who works with computers, even painted his nails all the colors of the inks used in color printing, which mix together to make most of the colors we see.

Coon thinks it's great that Finucane paints his nails. But she doesn't like it on herself. It makes her feel uncomfortable, "like if someone were forced to dress up in drag if they didn't want to," she says.

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Rae Tutera is the official "queer clothier" of a bespoke clothing company based in New York City. Mimi Lester /Rae Tutera hide caption

itoggle caption Mimi Lester /Rae Tutera

Rae Tutera is the official "queer clothier" of a bespoke clothing company based in New York City.

Mimi Lester /Rae Tutera

Self-Expression And Suits

Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker at San Francisco State University who studies sexual orientation and gender identity in youth, says many millennials, like Coon and Finucane, are defying gender expectations.

"This generation views gender as a mark of self-expression — they view it as a way of displaying their full sense of self," she says.

For example, Rae Tutera, who will appear in an upcoming documentary produced by Lena Dunham about gender nonconformity in fashion, says that the first time she felt like herself was in a men's suit.

Tutera, 29, says she is "on the masculine side of the gender spectrum." She has short hair and light freckles. While at a sandwich shop near her house in Brooklyn, she turned her back each time she took a bite out of her egg sandwich in case it got messy.

Tutera bought her first suit after she was invited to a formal New Year's Eve party five years ago.

"Sometimes you have to act braver than you feel," she says, remembering what it felt like to enter a fancy men's suit store in Manhattan.

Tutera has worn men's clothing for most of her life. But before, she says, the clothes hid her. In that suit, made exactly to her measurements, Tutera realized she has the right to be visible.

Tutera searched for a tailoring company where she could learn to make suits for other people like her, and make the process better. She ended up at Bindle & Keep, a company based out of New York City, and became their official "queer clothier." "Queer" in this case doesn't just mean gay; it also refers to anyone who finds that traditional gender categories don't quite fit.

Young People Push Back Against Gender Categories

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Three Suits, Lena Dunham's documentary, will follow three of Tutera's clients as they get fitted for their first suits. It'll be about "the unparalleled meaning" these suits have in their lives, says Tutera.

Finding A Voice

But for some millennials, expressing their gender in a way that feels right is less about finding one article of clothing, or a set style, and more about fluidity.

Greg David, a 24-year-old employee of the chain clothing store Urban Outfitters in Washington, D.C., says, "There's certain days for it," when asked if he thinks of himself as masculine.

On any given day he might wear a flowing silk shirt, pants so tight as to be almost leggings and maybe even a brooch.

David came out as gay in high school. But it wasn't until college, when he realized he could wear whatever he wanted to, no matter what gender it was designed for, that he felt like he came into his own.

New Boom

These Are Your Millennials, America

"Dressing this way is how I found my voice," he says.

Gender-bending millennials such as David aren't exactly the norm, though, according to Suzanna Walters, director of the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University. She says most millennials don't push gender boundaries.

"It's a real minority. And it gets played up in the media more than everyday life. The vast majority of people still obey gender roles," she says. "Just walk down the street."

Mostly, you'll see millennial women dressed femininely, and millennial men dressed masculinely.

But many even conventionally dressed millennials are considering the ways in which gender might be flexible.

"It's something people are playing with: ... What does it mean to act more masculine in the classroom? More feminine when listening?" says Alejandra Oliva, a 22-year-old student at Columbia University.

It's questions like these that the gender-bending set raises both out loud and through clothes and accessories. And they're questions anyone can think about, whether or not they feel comfortable in nail polish.

Lidia Jean Kott is a production assistant for NPR.org.

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Millennials

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So I think this is a new style of pope, a new way of being pope among the people, and that is, as it were, to make the ordinary people the protagonist.

On the influence of his Latin American upbringing

He's the first pope to come, of course, from the New World, he's the first pope really to come out of that context where poverty is dominant. Now that's a very different kind of context from which popes have traditionally come.

That gives him a sensitivity to poverty. It gives him a sensitivity to need and to vulnerability. And from the very beginning, therefore, he's identified with and used the language of what he calls the existential margins, the "existential peripheries," as he calls them.

Now "existential peripheries" is obviously places of pain and suffering, but it also has a kind of concrete sense in Latin America as being the shantytowns that encircle the cities.

So this is the place he wants the church to be seen in, to identify with, to speak from, to evangelize from. That's what also makes him a radical in that Latin American liberation theology tradition.

On the controversy surrounding Bergoglio's time in Argentina during the country's "Dirty War"

He didn't speak out, because speaking out would have contradicted his two objectives during the "Dirty War," which were objectives, in fact, given to him from Rome. One was to protect the Jesuits from the regime. And the second was that he should help the victims of the dictatorship. And, of course, he couldn't fulfill either of those objectives if he took a position of opposition to the regime, which anyway wouldn't have resulted in anything, because anybody who did speak out against the regime was quickly silenced or exiled.

More On Pope Francis

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Pope Says God Not 'A Magician, With A Magic Wand'

Religion

In Francis' First Year, A 'Radical Pope' Seeks To Save His Church

The Two-Way

Pope Francis Discusses Gay Catholics: 'Who Am I To Judge?'

Parallels

Pope Francis: Even Atheists Can Be Redeemed

So those were his two objectives, and he pulled it off to a remarkable extent. Not one Jesuit lost his life. And he did protect, we now know, and sheltered dozens of people who were fleeing the dictatorship.

On perceptions of Pope Francis, and his comments on social issues

I feel very strongly that he's been consistently misjudged by one group of Catholics and also, of course, by certain parts of the liberal media.

They know he's shaking things up, which he is. But they mistake that for a kind of attempt to change doctrine. I mean, on all the core Catholic teachings, he is a absolutely straight-down-the-line orthodox Catholic. But he is also an evangelizer and a missionary.

And his observation — the famous observation — that we shouldn't bang on too much about abortion and those other issues, his point is not that abortion isn't wrong. I can cite you many speeches in which he gives searing denunciations of abortion. It's that he says it is not enough for people to look at the Catholic and say, "Yes, that's what the church stands for."

What's missing from the picture, he says, is the merciful face of Christ. The church that heals the wounds, that raises people up, that nurtures them, that forgives them. And so what he's trying to do is to say, "Actually, that's the face of the church that needs to be presented."

Now, this isn't a PR exercise. What he's actually saying is people need to experience that before they are ready to accept the rest of it.

So what is conversion? Conversion is when somebody first experiences the love and mercy and forgiveness of God, and then, having assimilated that, then, as it were, chooses the Christian life, chooses the moral life, and so on. But you can't go to the second without the first.

Read an excerpt of The Great Reformer

Pope Francis

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