Category: Multicultural

July 2, 2019

The Distance Between Us

Written by Reyna Grande
Memoir

Awards

2012 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
2016 Eureka! Honor Awards from the California Reading Association
2017 Honor Book Award for the Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature
2017 International Literacy Association Children’s Book Award
International Latino Book Award 1st Place

About the Author

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author and inspirational speaker who was born in Mexico. Reyna came to America at 10 years old as an undocumented immigrant. She later became the first in her family to graduate college. She is and avid promotes Latino literature. She currently teaches creative writing at UCLA.

Book Summary

The Distance Between Us is the true story of Reyna Grande’s life in a poor town in Mexico and her and her family’s journey as they navigate life, poverty, immigration to the U.S., alcoholism and abuse, and simply growing up. Reyna’s parents leave Mexico to find work so they can build a better life for their children back in Mexico. Reyna’s father left when she was only 2 and his head was always filled with dreams, dreams of a better life, a safe house for his family, and opportunities for his children. Reyna and her siblings have to deal with the fact that if their parents are to accomplish their dreams, they have to leave them with grandparents, in poverty, while they cross the border to work in El Otro Lado, “The Other Side”.

Multicultural Elements

Multicultural books are necessary for the representation of the experiences of all humans. “Literature can be one of the most powerful tools for combating the ignorance that breeds xenophobic and judgmental behaviors” (Tunnell et al., 2016, p. 202). Reyna’s memoir is an honest, credible, interesting, and believable story of her actual experiences with poverty, abuse, immigration, and adapting to a brand new culture and environment. Readers can experience the challenges that undocumented immigrants face when moving to a new country; learning the language, adapting to a different culture, and lack of supports like health insurance and family. They can learn that they face racism and ridicule for not “fitting in” or speaking the language. They can learn how it feels when you’re only choice to provide for your family is to leave them behind or risk their lives to take them with you. They can learn how it feels to long to be in two place, two cultures at once.

Was my uncle right? Was it better to be poor but together? Or was it better to try to find a better life, even if it meant breaking up your family?”

p 268

Books serve as a mirror, but also a window. Students who can see themselves in the experiences and lives of Reyna and her family will be able to feel like their experiences are validated and that they are not alone. Students who cannot relate to Reyna’s experiences will be able to use this book as a window into the life and culture of Reyna and her family, as well as many other immigrant people who share a similar story. Reyna’s experiences are not always positive, but they are honest. Students can become empathetic towards those who have experiences just like the ones in the book, whether it be with immigration, poverty, alcoholism, abuse, or abandonment. They can also be proud of Reyna as she follows her dreams, overcomes adversity, and accomplishes her goals.

Critical Literacy

Since we follow Reyna from childhood in Mexico all the way until she graduates college in America, we get to see life from a view different perspectives of hers. When she is a child in Mexico, living with her grandmother, she longs for her mother and father to return so that they can be a family again, and so they can get away from the abuse of her father’s mother. At this time, she can’t quite understand why her parents had to leave them. “Me ama mi mamá? ‘Does my mama love me?’ If so, why is she so far away?” (p 60). But later, after she is much older and has lived in America for a while, she finally gets to visit her family in Mexico. She finds out then that the people in the town where she is from have begun to view her differently, not that she lives in El Otro Lado and is more or less out of poverty in their eyes. “I was no longer considered Mexican enough. To the people there, who’d seen me grow up, I was no longer one of them” (p 270). Readers can discuss why this might happen and how Reyna felt to be disowned by her the people of her home town. Mago shows the reader a different perspective in that she viewed the U.S. as her new home and appeared to actually be trying to erase her connections to her old home. Why would Mago do this? Is she ashamed of Iguala, of her poor background? “Even in her speech, she was trying to erase Mexico completely” (p 272).

Another perspective that shines through is that of her father and how his upbringing and immigration experiences have affected the way he raised his children. Mila would remind the children after he would abuse them that he did not know any better since that was how he was raised. Reyna would explain that it was tiring to hear those excuses and her justifying his behavior. This is very relatable to those that have experienced abuse. Her siblings got out and started families as fast as they could, not trying to pursue the dreams their father tried to instill in them. On the other side of the coin was Reyna. Despite it all, she believed in those dreams and kept fighting for them. This is a very positive and hopeful light to which readers can view Reyna’s experiences. She won her first writing competition, met her hero, Diana, and was the first in her family to ever graduate college.

When my father beat me and insulted me when he was drunk, I’d hold on to the dreams he had given me.”

p 251

Another perspective that struck me, was of Reyna as a new student that only spoke Spanish and the educational inequities she experienced because of this. She was placed in a “regular” classroom and then segregated to a table with the other Spanish speaking students. Socially this excluded them, as classmates would view them as other and because the school and the teachers weren’t trying to include them, why would they? Reyna mentions that the she has an “addiction to reading” (p234), yet it wasn’t until she meets Diana in community college that she gets to experience Latinx literature! If that isn’t a call for more representation of diverse cultures and backgrounds, then I don’t know what is.

For the first time since I’d become an avid reader, I found myself reading about characters who lived in a world like my own, characters with the same color skin as mine. With the same heartaches and dreams.”

p 300

Readers might not have been aware of the struggles of those in poverty, of those leaving everything behind to find opportunities in the U.S., of being an undocumented person just trying to live. Hopefully after reading this book, students would be drawn to take action for social justice against the inequities faced by undocumented immigrants. Most are fleeing circumstances worse than we can every imagine. Reader can learn to question why we have these imaginary borders dividing humans from humans and why because of these invisible lines, people are dying, are being put in cages, and are being taken away from their parents.

‘This is where Mexico ends and the U.S. begins,’ the coyote said. But no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t tell how he knew that. It all looked the same to me. ‘The line is invisible.’ he said, as if reading my thoughts.

Reyna was 10 years old when she risked her life to come to the US – p 141

References

Grande, R. (n.d.) Biography. Retrieved from http://www.reynagrande.com

Tunnell, M. O., Jacobs, J. S., Young, T. A., & Bryan, G. (2016). Children’s Literature, Briefly (6th ed.). Upple Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.