The Distance Between Us: A Memoir Author: Reyna Grande | Language: English | ISBN:
B0061QB04W | Format: EPUB
The Distance Between Us: A Memoir Description
Mago pointed to a spot on the dirt floor and reminded me that my umbilical cord was buried there. “That way,”
Mami told the midwife, “no matter where life takes her, she won’t ever forget where she came from.”
Then Mago touched my belly button . . . She said that my umbilical cord was like a ribbon that connected me to Mami. She said, “It doesn’t matter that there’s a distance btween us now. That cord is there forever.” When Reyna Grande’s father leaves his wife and three children behind in a village in Mexico to make the dangerous trek across the border to the United States, he promises he will soon return from “El Otro Lado” (The Other Side) with enough money to build them a dream house where they can all live together. His promises become harder to believe as months turn into years. When he summons his wife to join him, Reyna and her siblings are deposited in the already overburdened household of their stern, unsmiling grandmother.
The three siblings are forced to look out for themselves; in childish games they find a way to forget the pain of abandonment and learn to solve very adult problems. When their mother at last returns, the reunion sets the stage for a dramatic new chapter in Reyna’s young life: her own journey to “El Otro Lado” to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father.
In this extraordinary memoir, award-winning writer Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years, capturing all the confusion and contradictions of childhood, especially one spent torn between two parents and two countries. Elated when she feels the glow of her father’s love and approval, Reyna knows that at any moment he might turn angry or violent. Only in books and music and her rich imaginary life does she find solace, a momentary refuge from a world in which every place feels like “El Otro Lado.”
The Distance Between Us captures one girl’s passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. A funny, heartbreaking, lyrical story, it reminds us that the joys and sorrows of childhood are always with us, invisible to the eye but imprinted on the heart, forever calling out to us of those places we first called home.
- File Size: 17527 KB
- Print Length: 338 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: B007MCB3T6
- Publisher: Washington Square Press (August 28, 2012)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0061QB04W
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,840 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #8
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Lawyers & Judges - #27
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National - #44
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
- #8
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Lawyers & Judges - #27
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National - #44
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
"The Distance Between Us" may be the most important book you read this year. No matter what your politics are, the immigration debate is definitely one of the most, if not the absolute most, contentious issues of this tumultuous election season. It becomes easy after awhile to let the images of fences, government legislation, and faceless bigotry cloud our perspectives. Reyna Grande has provided us with a very personal narrative, one that puts a special "face" on the issue.
The face belongs to little Reyna...a four year old resident of Iguala,Mexico, who is delegated to the care of her paternal grandparents when her parents make the decision to flee (illegaly) to "El Otro Lados" (The United States) to earn enough money to eventually return to Mexico and their children to build their "dream house." Reyna is the youngest of three, her older brother and sister provide much needed solace to Reyna during the ordeal, which lasts way, way too long.
We follow the Grande children through their breathtaking struggle to cope with surviving the life of "little orphans" in Mexico and all the way through the difficult path that comes with the remainder of their childhood. All of it expressed through the musings of Reyna, or "Nena" as she is lovingly referred to by her "little mother", her sister, Mago. As memories perceived through the eyes of a child, become the reader's guide, the book takes us on an intimate tour of the Mexican immigrant's experience both left behind in Mexico and across the perilous border into El Otro Lados.
This book is not as heavy on poetry, beautiful prose, and magical realism as many previous Latina/Chicana pieces of literature that I have read.
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