Award-winning author Reyna Grande shared her experience in realizing her own “American dream” of self-discovery after crossing the border illegally from Mexico into the U.S. as a child and facing the struggles building a new life in a foreign land can bring. In honor of Women’s History Month, she presented “Crossing Borders: Reyna Grande on Immigration and The American Dream” March 3 in Newman Auditorium.
The ideal notion of the “American dream” is a hopeful one filled with uncompromising promise. However, for young Reyna Grande, the American dream meant a family separated by a perilous border and heartbreaking disappointments. It was not until she was a student in college that she realized what the real dream could be.
When Grande was 2, her father left their hometown of Iguala, Mexico for Los Angeles to find a job that would earn enough money for him to build a real house for his family.
Two years later, her mother joined him while Grande and her siblings stayed with their grandparents. The family was separated for eight years. Grande recounted how she only knew her father’s face from an old black and white photograph. When he returned, she almost didn’t recognize him in color.
When Grande was 9, she and her siblings followed their father on the dangerous trek across the border, guided by a smuggler. Her father initially wanted to come back for her because she was so young, but Grande insisted on keeping her family together. “Running across the border was the difference between having a father and not having a father in my life. And that was what crossing the border meant to me,” Grande said.
It took the family three attempts to cross. Grande realized how dangerous their situation was on the second attempt, when they stumbled across a body shoved beneath a bush.
Once settled in L.A., the American dream wasn’t what Grande had anticipated. Much of her early years there were spent living in fear and isolation. She feared speaking and accidentally giving her family away, ensuring their deportation. She feared speaking because English was not her first language and her teachers did not reach out to her.
Grande finally found her voice through writing a story for a school contest, but then she felt the pain of having that voice smothered after witnessing her teacher place her story into the ‘reject pile’ because it was written in Spanish. “It was more of a rejection of who I was as an immigrant,” Grande said. Her words had been rejected and so had her heritage.
It would not be until Grande attended a junior college that she found her voice again through a professor’s encouragement. “That was my survival tactic, to turn to stories to guide me and to help me understand,” said Grande, remembering when her passion for stories ignited. The spark returned because someone believed in her and Grande found faith in herself.
Grande was also inspired to honor her heritage as a Latina in her writing. This led her to find her own American dream. This dream was realizing she was capable of accepting herself, seizing opportunities and determining her path to success:
“To me, it’s always been an important thing to visualize the kind of future I want to have, to visualize the person I want to be. And that to me is the American dream,” she said.
The first of her family to attend college, Grande graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, film and video. She later received her master’s of fine art in creative writing from Antioch University. Grande has published three books, “Across a Hundred Mountains,” “Dancing with Butterflies” and the memoir “The Distance Between Us.” She is currently writing a fourth.
Learn more about Reyna Grande at reynagrande.com.