//BIOGRAPHY As the middle child and only male in a family of mostly women— 3 older sisters, an older brother, a single mom, and an equally fierce old-school latina grandmother— Miguel has always been blessed with getting the female perspective of things. What Dylan and his estrogen-centric household wasn't blessed with was an abundance of money. Mama Nieves worked hard. Harder than most even. She juggled waitressing and cleaning dingy motels on the outskirts of town with all the steel and nerve of a woman who'd been dealt a trying hand from the get-go. that hard nosed attitude ran rampant in the family. Everyone contributed to making ends meet, whether it was saving on laundry detergent by borrowing from neighbors or making a gallon of milk last that much longer by watering it down, the Nieves kids held down the fort while mom brought home the checks. Dylan was just a cog in that complicated machinery, one who grew accustomed to taking his orders from tough, foul mouthed hispanic women throughout his life.

It wasn't half bad, but it wasn't a walk in the park. Every girl he brought home got dissected like a dead amphibious science project on the cutting board, and god forbid the boy break some poor girl's heart. By the time high school neared it's end, the belief that Miguel might have been the more sensitive and softer member of his clan had some merit to it. More than anything it had to do with his sisters being a bunch of tough-as-nails ladies. It also had a little bit to do with Miguel never quite finding his own voice or flying by his own compass among a crowd of domineering females. That changed a year after high school, when it was expected that Miguel would parlay a talent in the kitchen to his mother's newly opened restaurant. Instead he decided his future would be better served enlisting in the united states marine corps when things were still dangerous overseas it's difficult to assess what posed greater peril to his health, enemy combatants or the combined wrath of the women in his family when he told them he was going to war.

The idea that he was joining the marines to "become a man" quickly became preposterous to him after joining. The military was a terrible fit, a discipline problem through and through, somehow Miguel managed to stay in the service for all of a 2 years before he got article 15'd right out. Since his exit he's emerged with an even harder edge and a distaste for making money in legal, conventional ways.