Reyna Grande’s immigrant history is grounded in loneliness, dislocation, a fractured birth family, psychological abuse, physical abuse, and racism. Its broad outline is sadly not that unusual, and it is more relevant than ever in the Trump era. But what Grande fashions from her experiences transcends the ordinary and expected. Migrant Heart, a collection of 18 essays and her seventh book, is about (to quote its subtitle) “things I can’t forget.” Chances are the reader will not be able to forget them either.
Grande crossed the Mexico–United States border without documents at age nine. She came with her father, brother, and sister, and it was their third try. “My entire being still carries the phantom limb pain of a life left behind,” she writes. “Resettling in a foreign environment means leaving everything you know, leading to an immense loss—family, community, social networks, language, and cultural identity. Nostalgia for what’s left behind traps you, forcing you to live simultaneously in the present and past, a perpetual emotional homelessness.”
The essays cover a range of personal topics that grow out of this experience. They revisit Grande’s impoverished Mexican childhood; explore the loss of her father and then her mother to the lure of a better life in the United States, as well as their divorce and subsequent remarriages; and reveal the myriad challenges of life in a strange country. “There comes a time when you look in the mirror with new eyes and no longer recognize yourself,” writes Grande. “You’re becoming a chimera, the DNA of two languages, two cultures, two countries now at war inside you.”
Assimilation was the goal, but as Grande and her siblings became more American, “the less we understood our mother. We internalized the disdain US American society feels for immigrants like her—the undereducated, non-English-speaking, low-skilled immigrant worker living on the margins of society. We began to reject her and all she represented. Our US Americanized eyes saw her as a symbol of everything we desperately wanted to escape.”
That alienation never fully disappeared. Grande’s father’s violence and alcoholism increased. Her fierce ambition to reinvent herself was coupled with self-doubt, but she pushed ahead. She found mentors, earned a degree from UC Santa Cruz, another from Antioch University, became an author, teacher, and motivational speaker. She married, had children, won awards.
“I write the stories I longed to hear, creating a home on the page myself,” she explains. However, home is elusive and constantly changing. Grande writes in English, a language in which she did not become proficient until junior high. Ironically, her Spanish translations of her own books were criticized for errors. In gaining fluency in English, she had lost proficiency in her mother tongue. She characterizes those mistakes as “scar tissue, a constant reminder of the tear, the permanent loss of what once was.”
Her truth, like all truths, is a blend of facts and subjective memory, of discovery and loss. A truth that is constantly evolving. As a child, she thought her brownness was a defect, something to be fixed, but on the eve of her wedding to a white man, she painted the figurine topping her wedding cake brown, “decolonizing” herself in an act of self-affirmation and defiance.
Written over more than a decade, these essays, which revisit some aspects of her immigrant history that she has written about in other books, vary in tone and format. Inevitably, some are more successful than others. Grande references other immigrant authors, such as Ocean Vuong and Viet Thanh Nguyen, when her own observations need no buttressing. Sociological, psychological, and political terms are invoked for valid reasons but sometimes sound academic. Essays on gardening, writing, and health challenges draw arguably facile equivalencies—one equates birthing a child with getting published.
But these are quibbles.
There are three standouts in this standout collection. “Dictionary of a Father’s Death” is breathtaking in its poetic form and ultimate forgiveness of a flawed man overwhelmed by change and addiction. “Into the Borderlands” describes an encounter with the Border Patrol in the Arizona desert while Grande and others were filming a documentary about refugees. They were detained, and Grande was repeatedly asked if she was a U.S. citizen, even as the Border Patrol agent held her passport in his hand. She thinks of her own crossing as a child and all those who have died, as she easily could have while attempting the same. “The mandate is clear: to keep bearing witness, to keep telling these stories.”
Finally, “A Flight to Remember” describes an airport encounter between an exhausted Grande on a book tour and a young Guatemalan asylum seeker recently released from detention who was on his way to meet siblings already in the United States. He told her he had nothing but the clothes on his back. They traveled together. His story was decades removed from her similar one but equally harrowing. She considered her economic privilege, her middle-class children whose lives are so different than his and hers were at their age. They landed. His siblings were not there, but she heard later that they had found him. A happy ending, maybe.
There are heroes in this book: teachers, libraries, friends. Not least, Grande herself. Her story—and this is above all a book of stories—is a contemporary version of the American dream, her saga an inspirational rebuttal to all those who think of immigrants as “less than.” Narrative generosity turns her story into a universal one. She effects a kind of alchemy, transforming trauma into strength. Her umbilical cord is buried in Mexico; she and her family now live in California. Being a cultural chimera, a “hybrid being,” has “made me more,” she realizes.
At the book’s end, there’s a lovely vignette about a damaged butterfly that Grande’s daughter Eva coaxed to fly. “For migrants, the difference between life and death, between success and failure, is often as fragile as the wings of a butterfly,” the author observes. “With a little help, we can rise above the circumstances we are born into. We can find the strength to survive. And we can learn to fly.”•
MIGRANT HEART: ESSAYS ABOUT THINGS I CAN'T FORGET, BY REYNA GRANDE
Anne Pedersen is an award-winning writer and a visual artist. She has also worked as a print and television journalist and a motion picture studio executive.
