Kirkus Reviews QR Code
RAISING RAUL by Maria Hinojosa

RAISING RAUL

Adventures Raising Myself and My Son

by Maria Hinojosa

Pub Date: Oct. 25th, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88445-6
Publisher: Viking

A salsa-spiced memoir of a “Latina gringa,” who struggles with career, marriage, motherhood, and the push-pull of her Mexican heritage vs. the ambitious, independent woman formed in “gringo-landia”—the United States. Author Hinojosa is a CNN correspondent and host of the National Public Radio show “Latino USA.” A winner of several professional awards, named as one of the 100 most influential Latinos in the United States, satisfied in her work and in her marriage to a talented artist from the Dominican Republic, she wanted more. She wanted a child. This is the vividly told story of Hinojosa’s efforts to conceive and to become the madre that her own Mami and tias were. Through two much-mourned miscarriages and a lamented Cesarian (she wanted to bear her child “naturally,” as her Mexican forebears had done), she and her husband had a son, Raul. Difficulty in breast-feeding led to fear that she was “a total loser,” followed by all the usual guilt about her adequacy as a mother, compounded when she returned to work. But her son survived and thrived, and armed with new patience and self-confidence, she and her husband had another baby. So far, so ordinary. But this story is far from ordinary, replete with loving, funny, sad, and always colorful stories of Hinojosa’s family and childhood in Mexico and Chicago, the news stories she has covered (from riots and drug dealers to a blind subway singer), her visit to a Yoruba priest who prescribed wearing five yellow scarves to hasten conception, her plunge into alternative therapies after a bout with typhoid, and life in the New York City barrio with drug dealers on every corner she and her husband chose to stay. A lusty tale of coming to womanhood that reconciles past and complex present in a way that will resonate with all women, Latina or no. (Author tour)