A Dream Called Home: A Memoir by Reyna Grande

Grande was born in Iguala, Mexico, in the state of Guerrero [pop quiz: how many states are in Mexico? Correct, 32]; she describes, especially early on, what it was like to grow up in this poverty-stricken city, located on Mexico’s Federal Highway 95, about halfway between the coastal town of Acapulco [100 miles to the west] and the capital, Mexico City [120 miles to the east]. “I had been born in a little shack of sticks and cardboard in my hometown of Iguala, Guerrero,” she writes, “a city only three hours from glittery Acapulco and the bustling metropolis of Mexico City” (14). Grande writes about “the shacks, the dirt roads, the crumbling houses, the trash – the grinding poverty” (46) and a childhood where “for the most part, my siblings and I were dressed in rags, wore cheap plastic sandals, had lice and tapeworms, and ate nothing but beans and tortillas every day” (15). One of her grandmothers [Abuelitas] grew up in Iguala, spent her whole life there, and died there, never once in her life having seen the ocean (227).

This is where her journey starts. Where she ends up is far, far away – and not just in terms of physical distance.

Her father was “a maintenance worker with a third-grade education [who] spoke little English” (4). This man, named Natalio Grande Cruz, left to enter America illegally in 1977, when Grande was two years old – a separation which seems to have created an unresolvable tension between the two of them, and between him and most of the other family members too, one that never would be remedied, despite attempt after attempt by her to connect with him [Grande’s first major publication was a memoir titled The Distance Between Us, a book that takes up this relationship and her early life more than this one, which opens with her about to start her freshman year at UC Santa Cruz – this book very much feels like a sequel].

In 1982 Natalio returned for his wife, and a great fear common in Mexican societies was alleviated: the father who left for El Otro Lado and vanished, never to be heard from again. But then this fear was passed on to the children: for two more years, Grande along with her siblings was in the care of multiple grandparents, waiting to hear from mom and dad. One gets the sense that one grandmother, Abuelita Chinta, is very kind and caring, and that Abuelita Evila, a physically and verbally abusive woman, lives up to her name – in fact, Grande literally says just that about her (14).

When Grande was nine, in 1984, her father “returned to Mexico to bring my older siblings and me back with him to the United States to give us a better life” (4). By this time, she’d come to find out, her mother and father had divorced.

So she and her siblings, like her mother and father, entered illegally. Here’s some context on her path from undocumented to legal citizen: in an article she wrote for Buzzfeed in 2018, Grande imparts, “Under an amnesty signed by Ronald Reagan, my family became legal residents, and eventually US citizens.”

That would be the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted citizenship to most people who’d entered the country illegally prior to January 1, 1982. Grande entered after this, but her father was legalized, having entered in 1977, and subsequently he established that his children were in fact his children, and that he could support them financially. This paved the way to her legal status.

Why did Reagan sign this bill? The teeth of it was to crack down on American employers who hired illegal immigrants, with legalizing current workers as a more practical solution than deporting them all and hiring new workers. This didn’t seem to have much effect; illegal immigration rose sharply after the Act was implemented [from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013], and the practice of employing illegal immigrants continued as well, in large part due to a common workaround: subcontracted labor, meaning workers were treated as freelancers in effect, for whom the employer would not bear responsibility. And oversight of which workers were illegal and which were not was lax.

Grande describes a very turbulent and traumatic home life. Her father was an alcoholic, and a verbally and physically abusive man. As I said, he divorced Grande’s mother when the two of them were in America, and Grande and her siblings still in Mexico. This seemed to have damaged the mother irreparably. “When I was seven years old,” Grande writes, “my father left my mother for my stepmother, and she was never the same. She didn’t want to be a mother to us anymore. It was as if when my father divorced her, she in turn divorced her children” (5). Throughout the book, all the way to the end, Grande describes a distant mother, and a distant and uncaring father – who would die of alcohol-related liver problems when she was in her early thirties (322).

Grande into young adulthood lived with her father and stepmother; that marriage ended in divorce, but shortly thereafter, she writes “my father asked my stepmother to reconsider their divorce, and she did, but with one condition – she didn’t want us around” (4). She renders a portrait of a man who alternately sought to guide his children to a better life and who would assault them with physical and emotional attacks. She writes that “One day my father would tell us to reach for the stars and to dream big. Then the next day when he had drunk too much and his other side emerged, he was literally beating us to the ground, calling us a bunch of pendejos, ignorant fools” (24). They never really moved their relationship to a better place – which is clearly on dad. Later, she tells us that when she was an adult, her father “was a private man and didn’t like to share anything about himself, especially with his children. My father was a mystery to me, a puzzle with too many missing pieces that I wished I could find and put together so I could finally fully understand the man whose blood flowed through my veins” (200).

But he did bring Grande across the border, and worked to instill in her the importance of education. Grande tells us that repeatedly, he father would assert that “Higher education is the only way to succeed in this country. My father had drilled that into us the minute we had arrived in Los Angeles…He believed so strongly in the dream of higher education that he had been completely devastated when [her siblings] Mago and Carlos dropped out of college” (6).

Grande did well enough at Pasadena City College to earn admission to UC Santa Cruz in 1996. This is where the book opens. “I was transferring to the University of California, Santa Cruz,” she writes, “leaving to pursue the wild dream of becoming the first in my family to earn a university degree” (3). A major theme of the book emerges right away: breaking cycles. “If I did things right,” she says, “I would one day break the cycle my family had been stuck in for generations – a cycle of poverty, hunger, and a lack of education” (8). Upon arrival she saw how white the campus was, and how wealthy people seemed. Watching students moving in, she found herself wondering, “Did those students realize how lucky they were? I imagined myself in their place – at a farewell party showered by relatives with their congratulations and best wishes and I’m-so-proud-of-you’s” (13). Later she says, “Some students were in college thanks to their parents’ occupations. I was there in spite of mine” (102).

One of the major issues with being a “first-generation” college student, in other words the first person in your family to go to college, is the lack of a network of support as you navigate the confusing and overwhelming world of higher education. Grande was definitely in this category. She writes, “With my father’s third-grade education, and my mother barely managing to finish sixth grade at seventeen years old, the day I started junior high school I had surpassed my parents in terms of education” (20).

Short redirect toward mom, who, like dad, just wasn’t invested much in giving time and attention, or praise, to her daughter: early in the book, Grande writes that when she achieved this monumental task of gaining acceptance to an elite college, “It hadn’t mattered to her if we [she and her siblings] weren’t in her life. My departure to Santa Cruz hadn’t made a bit of difference to her” (5). How many readers let their parents know about it whenever they’ve accomplished something? How many are driven to show their parents they are successes? Can you imagine them reacting in such a way to such a noteworthy accomplishment? To you leaving home?

You get the impression that her mother was so unhappy with the end of her marriage the children were unwelcome reminders of the family that ceased to exist for her. At the very end of the book, Grande gives us a passage where her future mother-in-law during a Christmas visit “came up to me with a thick blanket and said, ‘Are you cold?’ She put the blanket on me, tucking it around my legs and hips with motherly familiarity…I sat there on the couch, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. I tried to remember if my own mother had ever done that for me” (308). Ever.

She brings up something else about her time in Santa Cruz, which I’d like to address: white kids begging. As a frequent visitor to San Francisco and someone who recently spent a significant amount of time in Berkeley, I can say that a lot of the big NorCal cities are infested with lazy upper-middle class white burnouts who think nothing of living outdoors and begging for money and food. Grande, um, noticed too. Looking at able-bodied white kids doing this, she writes, “The sight of these men begging bothered me…They were white, male, and American born. Those three facts along put them at an advantage over so many of us…I had never seen Latino men beg” (22-23).

Can I reference one of Grande’s forbears on this subject? You might know him: George Harrison, lead guitarist for the Beatles. George visited Haight-Asbury at the height of the Summer of Love, in 1967.

Here’s what he had to say about the people he saw:

“I expected them all to be nice and clean and friendly and happy [but instead saw] hideous, spotty little teenagers…I went there expecting it to be a brilliant place, with groovy gypsy people making works of art and paintings and carvings in little workshops. But it was full of horrible spotty drop-out kids on drugs, and it turned me right off the whole scene.”

While at UCSC, Grande took in her sister Betty, who was living in Mexico after being sent there by their mother; Betty there was continuing getting into trouble, like, for starters, having unprotected sex with a married man at 15, and “enrolled her at Santa Cruz High School as a tenth grader and took full responsibility for her…this teenage girl who took no pride in her grades and was rebellious to the core” (74). For a while, it worked. Grande writes that “We both had a safe and stable home where there were no abusive parents, no one to yell at us or demean us, no one to make us feel like failures” (78). Eventually though, one of her roommates snitched her out (four girls were living in a shared dormitory) and her sister had to leave; rather than evict her, Grande found them an apartment and they both moved into it, but soon Betty started ditching school, and then told Grande that at 16, she was pregnant. Grande says this is one of the things that keeps Latinas from advancing. She writes, “I had grown to believe that being a teenage mother was the worst thing one could be, especially for Latina girls, who already had too many obstacles to overcome” (110). Soon, Betty moved in with her boyfriend, and had the baby. Grande writes at this point the two hardly ever saw each other.

She became a creative writing major, and through a Chicana literature teacher named Marta Navarro, began to emerge as a writer. Marta told Grande her writing was like that of authors Juan Rulfo and Tomás Rivera (76-77); her mentorship led Grande to feel more confident, and eager to learn about new authors and get more involved in campus life: “Thanks to Marta,” Grande writes, “I had discovered a writer’s group of Latina students at UCSC, who published a literary journal twice a year called Las Girlfriends” (84). Another major theme of this book is the importance of mentors.

Her hard work paid off: “In June of 1999,” she writes, “I became the first person in my family to graduate from college, finishing my time at Santa Cruz with college honors, honors in my major, and Phi Beta Kappa” (131).

PS – Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest academic honor in America, given to outstanding students of arts and sciences at American colleges.

There’s a picture of her on page 131 graduating, wearing the same flower necklace thing that I’d wear a year later when I graduated from UC Santa Barbara. In fact, my mom still has it in the freezer, almost twenty years later [really…in a Ziploc bag, on a paper plate].

After this, though, was a period of struggle familiar to many I’m sure. Grande left school with debt, and like a true artist, no real idea of what the hell she wanted to do besides make art. And where to go? She ended up returning to Los Angeles, and moving in with her brother Carlos and his common-law wife and daughter “in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, and all they had to offer me was a couch in the living room, but I was grateful” (151). When I went to graduate school, I was working on my exit strategy before I even entered the program, but as an undergrad, I was so immersed in college life, I just didn’t want it to end. Grande seems like this at times; she says, “What I didn’t learn at UCSC, however, was what to do with myself once I was back in the real world” (152). Does this sound familiar to anyone? She also writes “I was jobless, broke, and had over $20,000 in student loans to repay. I wasn’t contributing anything to household expenses and was becoming a burden” (153). Another thing she experienced that I did too was missing the paradise that is a UC campus in a beautiful part of the world. Back in L.A., she “missed the city [of Santa Cruz] terribly, the smallness of it, the sense of community, the ocean, the redwoods, having my own room…L.A. was a city of concrete and strangers. It was gray and dull, not the lush, vibrant green and blue of Santa Cruz” (190). I too, returned to L.A. after graduating, and thought it sucked. I hated the traffic – I worked eleven miles from my job and it took me and hour to get there. That would be an average speed of eleven miles per hour.

What’d she do? What’d I do? Become a teacher. She was hardcore about it. For a time back in the 1990s and 2000s, the need for teachers was so great you could get an “emergency credential” in the Los Angeles Unified School District and basically just walk right in and start teaching. Grande did this; she “attended a one-week training session hosted by LAUSD staff…But the crash course on teaching had left me even more frightened. I had never once taken an education class” (159). She got into a middle school in South Central Los Angeles. When she saw her students for the first time, she noted that “They were all Latino, which made me happy until I realized most of them were little wannabe cholos” (161). She describes an absolute nightmare of a situation. She was teaching eighth grade, and you see she never really got comfortable at this level. Some of the kids’ behavior is appalling. One girl said, “You’re such a bitch” (205). Grande kept trying. “At first,” she writes, “I believed them [veteran teachers] and hoped things would get easier, that I could learn how to teach and engage and discipline my students, that I could learn how to follow the standards and create amazing lessons. But everything I tried ended up in chaos” (162). She says “My classroom was a zoo. I was so ashamed I kept my doors closed so that no one could hear me trying to deal with the chaos” (164).

Her writing career went on the backburner, and really all but disappeared from her life at this time. After she was done with a day of teaching, she writes that “In the evening, I would arrive at Carlos’s house feeling emotionally drained and physically exhausted. And I didn’t have a room of my own where I could retreat and recharge…My writing waited for me to return to it, but I could write only a few pages before exhaustion overwhelmed me” (163). She also says “As the weeks stretched into months I wrote less and less, until eventually I stopped completely” (170).

Grande got a little relief when she was switched to sixth grade teaching, where she seems to have done much better: “the sixth graders were small, so for once being short didn’t bother me as much. They also hadn’t yet lost their eagerness and enthusiasm for learning, and they didn’t dare call me anything but Ms. Grande. The sixth grade girls, unlike the older girls, looked up to me and respected me. They hadn’t yet developed the cynicism toward adult authority” (187).

Eventually, Grande wanted out of middle school altogether [a particularly bad exchange with a parent seems to have been the tipping point, another big difference between college teaching and secondary teaching: dealing with parents]. She started getting credentialed to teach adult school. At this time she had a son she named Nathaniel, who she conceived with a man who had babies with four different women, who lied to her and cheated on her and made it clear he’d be an absentee father [she writes that the man, named Francisco, “would come by once in a while to visit, but then would disappear for months on end, until one day he would call me out of the blue to ask about our son” (195)]. She describes a disastrous trip to Europe with this man, where he claims [probably deceptively] that his wallet got stolen, and he didn’t have any money to pay for anything. I knew someone who did that – this dude I knew in New Orleans flew to Florida to meet a girl he met in a French Quarter bar, knowing the whole time he was going to say the exact same thing when he got there. Freakin huevos, man.

Grande describes how she orchestrated a career change in this situation: “Since I worked full-time,” she writes, “I left Nathan with a babysitter from 6:45 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., while I was at work. And now with me taking credentialing classes, I wouldn’t be home until ten three nights a week, and my weekends would be spent at my writing classes” (208-209). This turned out to make a huge difference when the credentialing process was over and she had a new job: “The difference between middle school and adult school was like night and day. I soon found myself in a classroom with students who wanted to be there, were not being forced to be there” (243-244). That’s arguable. Anyway, she seemed to find more fulfillment in her work, more confidence that what she was doing was making a difference in the world: “When we give parents the opportunity to learn English, to improve their work skills, to get better jobs, to be exposed to new experiences and nurture their minds, they are in a better position to provide for their families. They are able to help their children with homework, or at least able to understand the demands of being a student” (245).

Grande remained distant from her parents. In one passage, she visits her father with her sister, and “not a minute after our arrival, he said to Mago, ‘Remind me again what your children’s names are?” (197). Who knows how much of it was the father disapproving of teen pregnancy? She herself has strong opinions on young pregnancies and Latinas. When her sister Betty was pregnant at 16, her other sister and sister-in-law were also pregnant. She writes, “There was a pregnancy epidemic happening in my family! I saw all those babies as obstacles to higher education because if my older siblings had dropped out of college – even when they were single and childless – pursuing higher education while supporting a family would prove a challenge too difficult to overcome” (89). This second passage occurred while she was still at UCSC – later of course we’d see how Grande’s own pregnancy complicated her career change, and writing goals.

Toward the end of the book, Grande returns to the theme of breaking cycles. She knew her father had been physically abused, and seems to resent him for passing that on to his children, writing, “If your own parents treated you so badly that you ran away, why did you do that to your own children? Where do you think that comes from? What can I do to not be like you, Papá?” (275). The page before that passage, she writes, “I thought about the abuse he had grown up with, and the abuse my mother had experienced. This was our history, a history of violence when abused children turned into abusive parents. I was trying to break that cycle with my son” (274).

Around this time Grande began writing again. She describes meeting “María Amparo, a teacher in a writer’s workshop” and working on a novel (212-214). Throughout the book, Grande talks about what writing has meant to her. “Since I was thirteen,” she says, “writing had been my lifeline. It had been the thing I would cling to when I felt most helpless” (206). She discusses the importance of centering her writing in her heritage, claiming “It was by writing about the people I knew, describing their plight, that I could honor their difficult experiences and keep them in my heart and mind” (74).

She started getting more and more serious about the book, titled Across A Hundred Mountains. She’d get home from work, and “When evening came and Nathan was in his bed asleep, I would spend the night working on my novel, the vessel I poured my heart and soul into” (239). She finished the manuscript, found an agent, and after a few months waiting [and getting a mediocre offer that she rejected], Grande “had an offer…out of twenty-seven editors we submitted to I finally found one editor who understood the story I had written, who would publish my book the way I had envisioned it” (280).

Across A Hundred Mountains was published by Washington Square Press, an imprint of Atria Books, in May, 2007. One protagonist is a Mexican girl named Juana García, who leaves her small town in Mexico for America, in search of her father, after her mother is imprisoned for killing a debt collector. The other protagonist is Adelina, who works at a women’s shelter in Los Angeles. Upon release, “Publishers Weekly gave Across a Hundred Mountains a starred review. People magazine said it was ‘elegantly written, a timely and riveting read.’ The El Paso Times called it a ‘breathtaking debut’” (315). It was “chosen as the Freshman Read for the Kresge and Porter College students” at UCSC, and one of her creative writing teachers “invited me to do a presentation of my book” (317). She returned to her alma mater to give a reading, and afterward, “Some students, especially the handful of Latinos in attendance, thanked me. One young woman said, ‘Thank you for writing your story. You’ve inspired me to keep fighting for my dreams.’ It was then that I knew my struggle had been worth it” (318).

Grande’s writing career took off upon the 2013 release of her third book, her memoir The Distance Between Us, a huge commercial and critical success; a finalist for the National Book Award in fact. She no longer teaches. Reading both of her memoirs, one sees that Grande’s had a hard life, to say the least. Abusive parents, poverty, violence, middle school students. I grew up in L.A., like her, went to a UC school, like her, got an MFA, like her, published a short story collection and a novel, like her, and my third book is a memoir, like hers. But my path has been much different. You find yourself happy she pulled through, and found success. You wonder how many people of any ethnicity have her qualities, her artistry, her resilience, her intelligence, her toughness. Reflecting on her life, she says, “I wondered if growing up in comfort had some disadvantages. You don’t learn how to struggle, to do without, to suffer” (310). Of herself and her siblings, she says, “We are what my father wanted us to be, hardworking and self-sufficient. Our priority now is teaching our children how to be those things too” (323). And the children seem to be thriving. In the last chapter, she writes “the next generation of college graduates in the Grande family is on its way. My nieces Natalia and Nadia are studying at a four-year university. My niece Alexa and my nephew Randy are both in community college with plans to transfer to a four-year university. My niece Sophia, her brother Carlitos, and my son, Nathan, are now in high school, on their way to college” (323). That’s a happy ending – getting a foothold in El Otro Lado, and laying the foundation for the generation coming up to have more, to prosper, to do well in life. Many people have strong feelings about immigration. I say anyone who demonstrates the character Grande shows should be recognized as having a high value to society. Anyone who shows the ability to contribute the ways she has should be a citizen of the United States if they so desire. And we can make room for them by cracking down on wrongdoers, and people who have overstayed their visas. And the rich assholes who would employ them, frankly.

One last thing. I have to bring this up.

Grande, while working at her middle school, met her husband, a white dude named Cory. When they became a couple, Grande and Cory and her son Nathaniel went to Racine, Wisconsin to visit his parents for Christmas. There is a hilarious passage in this section.

She wanted to cook chiles rellenos for the family, but there was a problem. “In Mexico,” she writes, “in L.A., whenever we made chiles rellenos, we roasted the green chili peppers directly over the flames of the gas stove. I panicked when I realized that Carol’s electric stove was not going to allow me to roast my peppers” (312). What did she do? Asked the mother and father to get the barbecue out. Yes really. In Wisconsin. In the dead of winter. She writes that her future mother in law “sent her husband to pull the grill, which they hadn’t used since the summer, out of the garage, while I bundled up from head to toe, preparing to go outside in the freezing cold. I spent half an hour shivering in the snow, roasting the peppers” (313).

That’s dedication to authenticity, right there. Did they have to clean the grill first, or go to the store to get charcoal? Oh well, I guess the people of Racine don’t often get to see a Latina roasting chili peppers on a barbecue in the middle of the snow at Christmastime. I guess the moral of the story is, if you’re going to cook a meal in a new house, do some recon on the kitchen equipment before choosing the entrée, heh heh.