The Culture of Memory

by

Lauren Roberts

Immigration is a topic that seems to arise with painful familiarity during every national political season. A hot button, particularly in California and other southwestern states, it is bandied about by politicians with contempt or sympathy, but always it is talked about in aloof terms—its economic impact, and its political, social and cultural influence. What is so often left out is the personal, the individual in the equation.

While it is impossible is to take a individual’s life experience and expand it to fit a group, individual stories can help our understanding of a complicated issue. Farmworker’s Daughter: Growing Up Mexican in America (Heyday Books; hardcover, $20; trade paperback, $11.95) by Rose Castillo Guilbault offers an excellent opportunity to do exactly this, to understand and to feel the intertwined hope and hopelessness that drives people to balance peril and potential.

The book is actually a chronologically-arranged collection of columns that Guilbault wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1990s under the heading, “Hispanic, USA.” The result is a compelling memoir in which incredible depth and poignant, powerful description is occasionally interrupted with flat prose. At times, she seems to depend on speed alone to move the narrative, which is annoying. But when she writes with feeling, oh, that feeling, like this vivid description of Vicam, Sonora, Mexico: “It’s the desert exhaling hot, arid air. Air that’s so still it stagnates and hovers like an invisible cloud. It’s the omnipresent sun, a giant orange ball that drips heat onto the land, flat as the bottom of a skillet.”

A personal memoir of a bilingual girl growing up in the Salinas Valley area of California—John Steinbeck country—in the 1950s and 1960s, Farmworker’s Daughter is a personal journey of her confused, often lonely search for her selfhood and her role in society. Throughout the story, Guilbault tries to balance the conflicts between her Mexican immigrant home life and her public American one.

It began for her when her mother, having divorced her philandering husband—a thing unheard of in the Mexican culture of the time—brought her to America. Encouraged and aided by a cousin who lived in King City, California, they boarded a Greyhound bus to join her. Shortly thereafter, her mother married farm foreman José García and Rose entered public school, the two conflicting worlds that would shape hers. It was often a painful meshing as when she relates the her mother’s failed attempt to make cupcakes, her classmates’ disdain of them and her vow to “never ask my mother to make anything for class ever again.”

But it was also the beginning of her determination to keep her home life separate from school life. The gap between the two cultures persisted as she shows us in the time she was prompted to bring her doll to school to share with the other girls. She was initially pleased that her doll was different from the others who all had the same one until she  understood that “doll” was not a generic term, but meant “Barbie.”

She missed out in other ways too—not invited to other children’s birthday parties or to their homes, kept away from empty seats on the bus by children who deliberately placed their books next to them. But when English began to be more than foreign noise, her adopted world opened. “At school, I heard the sounds, but didn't understand their purpose,” she wrote. “But slowly and unexpectedly, the English language revealed itself to me. Every new word and definition was like lifting a layer of film from my eyes.” And when she came under the tutelage of Mrs. Rojas, rumored to be “the meanest teacher in the entire school,” she found instead a gracious Mexican-American teacher who “gave me . . .  the seeds of self-worth, acceptance, and even pride in who I was . . .”

At age 15, Rose got her first glimpse of a world outside that of the norm for her gender and culture, that of writing. Despite her mother’s protests—“Writing stories is not a job or career. You can’t earn a salary to support yourself.”—Rose met with the only female reporter on the local paper, the Rustler Herald, and was soon writing for the paper as high school columnist, her first important step to her future media career.
 
Woven within the stories is the general background of the times—the Vietnam War, Cesar Chavez, union organizing. These provide context and color, but it is the personal relationships with people and places she details in a wonderful lyrical style that invites intimacy: her mother and father, Tia Lupe, Billie, Mrs. Rojas, Edith Winslow, Jimmy, and Vicam and the Salinas Valley.

Various themes pervade this book—Mexican social and family life and its darker sides of gender and class discrimination, the idealization of the American lifestyle, and the isolation when bridging two cultures. Though she relates mulitple injustices, the reader need not worry that the book is a litany of complaints. Far from it. In a 2005 interview with the Salinas Californian Guilbault said, “It’s a story that shows you can grow and move up. This is a book about hope.” And it is.

Farmworker’s Daughter has flaws, which are built primarily around the use of the original columns as book chapters. The two are different formats with different reader expectations. Chapters  in a book should not stand alone; rather, they require a flow that guides the reader through the story as a gentle river moves a leaf along its waterway. That sense of flow is missing here. I want to note, however, that the flaw does not detract in any important way from the quality writing and the author's passionate purpose. This book is an excellent investment of time for those readers seeking to understand immigration issues on an individual level as it is for those who are simply looking for a sensitive memoir.
 

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 900 bookmarks and approximately 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) and Book Publicists of Southern California as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. You can reach her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it