ABUELA IN SHADOW, ABUELA IN LIGHT

A poignant homage to the author’s Indigenous grandmother as well as an exploration of deep-seated family abuse.

González, a professor of English and creative writing and the author of numerous books of poetry and the acclaimed memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth, recalls his early upbringing in Michoacán, among his extended family, and “the government housing I grew up in, the Fred Young Farm Labor Camp—or El Campo, as it was commonly known.” Because his mother died when the author was 12 and his alcoholic father abandoned him and his brother, Alex, he was raised largely by his maternal grandparents. His grandmother, María Carrillo, who died in 2011, was not “the typical Mexican grandmother.” Rather, he writes, she was “one of a kind—a woman who challenged the depictions of those matronly, domestic older ladies we watched on Mexican telenovelas, las abuelitas.” María, a Purépecha, worked hard in the grape fields well into her old age while at the same time enduring physical abuse by her brutish husband. As González recounts, it’s also likely she had been sexually abused as a child, as had many girls and boys in the author’s extended family. The U.S.–born author was one of the many boisterous grandchildren and cousins who came to inhabit his grandparents’ house, largely for economic reasons. Sleeping on floors and sharing small spaces, González became prey to older cousins and uncles who sexually abused him. Only later in life, now a successful, independent gay man, did he hear from his female cousins that the abuse he suffered also happened to them. The narrative moves in thematic segments, gradually revealing a tender kinship between the hard-shelled abuela and the empathetic author—a precious connection amid a family scarred by domestic violence and intergenerational poverty.

An alternately touching and shocking narrative of a dysfunctional yet resilient Mexican American family.