PORTRAIT OF A MESTIZA

Marlowe’s memoir-in-essays examines issues of identity, belonging, and the corrosive effects of racism across three continents.

The author opens with a striking Halloween memory as an 11-year-old in Ecuador in 1978, when she divided her face in half with eyeliner and costumed herself as “una mestiza”—half Indigenous, half Spanish. For her Peruvian mother, “mestiza” was “a dirty word,” the author says, but this bicultural split would define Marlowe’s life. Raised in both her South American mother’s world and her Anglo American father’s, between Manila and Quito and Northern California, Marlowe inhabited what she calls “la frontera”—the borderlands where cultures clash. She traces how notions of racial hierarchy calcify within families, often under the guise of “tradition.” The essays circle around moments of exclusion and recognition: a friend flinching at a baby-tooth charm on her bracelet; someone calling her a “white bitch” during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, despite her “black hair curling down my back, my olive skin, my red lipstick and hoop earrings”; watching her mother cry after being labeled an “outsider” by Marlowe’s paternal grandfather. The collection’s power lies in the author’s ability to transform intimate family moments into sharp cultural critiques. “Death Tax” moves between her father’s physician-assisted suicide and her mother’s final days, with a fragmented structure that mirrors how grief “press[ed] on my shoulders,” but without offering false comfort. “The Window” turns a dinner party into a study of sustained exclusion. Marlowe excels at revealing how microaggressions accumulate within families over decades. The essays falter when self-consciousness overtakes the storytelling, however; in “Based on a True Story,” for instance, meta-commentary about narrative perspective obscures rather than illuminates the author’s incisive observations about performative allyship. When Marlowe’s voice finds its rhythm, however, it cuts clean; she’s unflinching about what she sees as her own complicity in the problems she diagnoses, refusing easy absolution. The collection’s achievement lies in Marlowe’s willingness to dwell in contradictions, and the uncomfortable space of feeling perpetually in between.

A bracingly honest portrait of a woman reckoning with inherited shame while searching for “a third space, a new way of thinking.”