A woman rose from her seat in the middle of the room. “I just want to ask you,” she said, “if you have any idea about the huge impact that you have on people that have read your story.”
Reyna Grande does now.
On Oct. 1, fans crowded Waldorf West Library to hear Grande speak about her memoir, “The Distance Between Us,” as part of the One Maryland One Book program. The program, run by the Maryland Center for the Book, chooses one book each year that best represents a certain theme and then invites the book’s author to tour Maryland to speak at schools, libraries and book festivals.
Grande’s memoir, chosen for the theme “the American Dream,” chronicles her childhood thousands of miles from her parents. Her father left when she was two; her mother when she was four to join him. Both journeyed across the border to the United States, a place they called “el otro lado,” or “the other side.”
When she was nine, her father returned to Mexico. This time Grande and her two siblings traveled with their father across the border, through the sand and heat and bushes, to the other side. To America.
“I am definitely living the American Dream,” Grande said, “but [I] paid a big price for that.” In her memoir, Grande wrote about the conflicts of immigrating to the U.S., “about everything that immigrants pay, everything that we gain and everything that we lose when we come to the United States.”
“Because we do lose a lot,” she continued. “We gain a lot, but we also lose things along the way.”
For years Grande resented the distant relationship created by her parents’ emigration. Yet by writing her parents as characters in her book, she came to see them not as the mother and father who abandoned their children, but as fully developed people with their own goals and motivations. “I felt that the memoir brought me to a place of understanding and forgiveness. It really gave me a chance to look back on my life, to understand that all the things that happened, as hard as they were, were things that made me who I am today.”
When Grande finished speaking, a silver-haired woman asked for the microphone. She had emigrated from England in 1961, she said, and had found Grande’s memoir to be “true to so many levels,” from the relationship with her parents, to the disconnect with her native culture.
“There were so many things there that I identified with.” Her voice cracked. “I was home — I still call it home — in England in August and people asked me where I’m from in America. So, at some level, you’re not from any place.”
Grande said she understood how it felt to be considered neither English nor American. At one writers conference, organizers listed her country as “Latino,” because, they said, she was neither American nor Mexican. And whenever she visits Mexico, she’s treated like a foreigner, a tourist. “I think we’re at a [point] in this country,” Grande said, “where we really need to redefine what an American is.”
La Plata High School librarian Ms. Carmen Belanger, a Puerto Rican-born American, attended Grande’s talk. She hopes to host a student discussion of “The Distance Between Us” as part of One Maryland One Book.
Ms. Belanger said Grande’s book was “a window into a world [she] didn’t know,” a part of Mexico where jobs and running water were scarce. Like Grande, she sometimes feels friction because of her origins. “People say, ‘Oh, you’re just Puerto Rican, you’re not really Spanish.’ Well, yes, I am.
“I feel American,” she said. “But I never shy away from my heritage. I’m proud of it.”
The woman from the middle of the room was not finished. Grande went through so much, she said: abandonment, her grandmother’s neglect, her father’s abuse. “You never gave up, and I think it’s a wonderful example to others going through things,” she concluded. “I feel like you are an inspiration to a lot of people, and I just wanted to thank you for your story.”
Reyna Grande smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
No Comments