MIGRANT HEART

Seeing the world from both sides of the border.

Novelist and memoirist Grande gathers 18 essays to create her third volume of memoirs that focus on early separation from her parents, her experiences as an immigrant, and her identity as a “border crosser, ‘illegal alien,’ daughter of an alcoholic, child abuse victim, disadvantaged inner-city youth, working-class Latina, first-gen college student.” Since these are themes she addressed in her previous books, The Distance Between Us (2012) and A Dream Called Home (2018), she admits to feeling increasingly aware “that by sharing my pain, I risk perpetuating a narrative of victimhood, becoming complicit in my own victimization, or reducing my experiences to immigrant trauma porn.” Responses from her readers and attendees at book talks and presentations, though, have convinced her how important her “advocacy and truth telling”—bearing witness to a “collective struggle”—has been to other Mexican American immigrants. In many essays, Grande revisits her childhood and youth: early years of abject poverty in Mexico; living with her physically abusive, alcoholic father after her parents split up; and arriving in the U.S. when she was 9, speaking no English, and being sent to ESL classes that made her feel marginalized. Intent on learning English, she lost her ability to speak Spanish, compromising her connection to her mother, who spoke no English. Grande reflects on the many ways that a society fixated on whiteness has made her feel inferior and sees the insidious prevalence of colorism and internalized racism among Mexican Americans. When she was pregnant with her daughter, for example, her mother wished the baby would have blue eyes like Grande’s white husband. Now 50, Grande devotes some essays to menopause, various debilities of aging (dry eye, hearing loss, sciatica), and parenting a son and daughter who “thrive in the bright, sunlit prison of the American Dream.”

Testimony from a defiant, resilient woman.