FIRST IN THE FAMILY

A Honduran Ecuadorian journalist and mental health advocate explores substance abuse in her family and its relationship to immigrant and racial trauma.

Born in San Antonio in 1982, Hoppe was the first-generation American child her parents believed would have everything they did not. Coming into the marriage, her parents achieved their own personal firsts like mothering without abandonment and fathering without violence. What they didn’t realize was that the American dream they chased across the country would demand “the sacrifice of our physical and mental health.” It would also cause the author to fall victim to the alcoholism that destroyed her maternal grandfather. College, the great American gateway to a shining future, brought with it stresses for Hoppe, as well, including a heavy work and class schedule and expectations of moving directly into a well-paying job. It also became the place where, overwhelmed by responsibility, she learned to see alcohol as the cure-all “solution” to hardship and the systemic injustices she faced as a brown-skinned woman. As her drinking worsened, Hoppe began forgetting incidents involving extreme, often dangerous levels of intoxication. She eventually found her way to therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous, only to discover that AA had no room for stories that involved the social inequities Hoppe knew had fueled her alcoholism. “Race-related trauma was labeled terminal uniqueness,” she writes, “and dismissed as a false projection of my self-centered ego.” As the author fought her way back to sobriety, she uncovered healing truths about relatives who had suffered from addiction and about the real yet unacknowledged founders of the modern recovery movement, Native Americans. As this raw, at times unsparing memoir probes the meaning of the American dream for immigrants, it also reveals the sickness inherent in all white supremacist projects, including those meant to heal.

An illuminating and intense reading experience.