That is why it has been hard for me to come to terms with the past,” she says. She still collects bottles and cans from trash cans to make ends meet, Grande says, and she is a far cry from the mother the Grande children wish they had. Her mother is alive and well in Los Angeles, but she can’t read or write in English. “He was such a private man, and I was exposing him to everyone,” she says. Grande does not think he would have enjoyed it. Her father died this past year, having never read the memoir. While this did not lead to a reconciliation, especially with her mother, she did begin to see why they did what they did. She went back to work, treating her parents as she would characters in a novel. “I needed to know their fears, their aspirations, their past, their goals. “The challenge for me was to remove all of the negative emotions that were coming across,” she sighs as she picked at a muffin in a café in Los Angeles, where she lives now. But Grande was told by her editor that the first draft read like a “grudge” against them. Her departure from her kids when they were young was like a severing of relations, an estrangement that has not eased to this day. She was especially angry with her mother, who has never played the role of nurturer or protector. To write The Distance Between Us, she had to confront the anger she felt toward her parents for being abandoned. Grande and her siblings, like so many other children of immigrants, became los olvidados, the “forgotten ones,” left to fend for themselves and to eventually try to reunite with their parents.īut Grande was still not done with purging her painful past. It is a timely and a vivid example of how poverty and immigration can destroy a family. Instead the story is told in Grande’s new memoir, The Distance Between Us. This episode in Grande’s life could have been plucked from Grimms’ fairy tales-she was so undernourished, she had worms in her belly, and Evila soaked her hair in kerosene to rid her of lice. But years passed, and the children were left in the care of Grande’s paternal grandmother, the wicked and aptly named Evila. Soon her mother followed, hoping to find him and bring him home. So her father joined the exodus with hope and a few pesos in his pocket. Massive unemployment, a devastating devaluation of the peso, and the persistent inability of the government to educate the masses led to a wave of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans going north in search of jobs. Mexico was coming off the boom years of the 1950s and ’60s with a population explosion.
It was 1976, and the family had been living in the dismal town of Iguala in the state of Guerrero.
It was a move that struck like an earthquake and soon disintegrated the Grande house. Novelist Reyna Grande was 2 when her father left Mexico for the United States.
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