By Melanie Slone
Reyna Grande is the multi-award-winning author of the bestselling memoir The Distance Between Us, and the sequel, A Dream Called Home; as well as novels focusing on the immigrant experience.
“I hadn’t really been exposed to literature written by people that looked like me,” Reyna Grande told North County Informador.
But at Pasadena City College in 1994, “Diana Savas was the first teacher who ever encouraged me to pursue a career as a professional writer,” she said, and she listened.
Reyna is excited to meet her readers at the Latino Book & Family Festival, where she is a keynote speaker. “I’m looking forward to sharing my work, and especially coming together to celebrate literature and the power of storytelling and how it’s so important, because literature can serve as a bridge and keep us connected,” she told us.
Immigration Stories
In her memoirs, Reyna, who migrated from Mexico to California in fifth grade, explores the immigrant experience. “The irony of my family story is that my parents came here because they wanted to build us a house, and in building us the house, they destroyed our home,” she said.
She wants immigrants “to feel empowered by reading these stories of immigration and to feel connected as a community, to feel celebrated, to feel seen.”
She also wants to reach people outside of the immigrant community. “I want them to think about their own immigrant history…Reconnect with where they come from and to start thinking about how can they be more understanding and more compassionate toward immigrants and celebrate immigrants.”
In “The Distance Between Us, one of the main themes I was writing about was distance, all kinds of distance, physical distance, emotional distance, the distance created by assimilation, the distance created by language or education,” she said.
For “A Dream Called Home, I knew that the theme was going to be home, the search for home, wanting to belong, creating a home that’s not a physical place but more of a place that I could take with me.”
History as a Novel
Reyna wrote her first historical novel, “A Ballad of Love and Glory,” to talk about the Mexican–American War without writing a history book. “My purpose for writing a novel was to educate the reader in terms of this history that we have not really learned in school…how does this violent history of the border continue to impact us to this day? And why is the relationship between Mexico and the US so complicated?”
She added, “As a Mexican living in California, it empowered me because for many, many years, I have been made to feel that I was the outsider… the novel shows you who were the invaders, and it was not the Mexicans … I felt that this war has been ignored so much and skipped over in US History classes that I didn’t want to use it as a mere backdrop to my love story.”
Language and culture
Reyna talked about the Spanish title of “A Ballad of Love and Glory. “I decided to use corrido instead of balada, because Mexicans love their corridos. We know corridos as something that has a lot of history, violence, and politics,” she explained. “Half of Mexico was devoured,” in that war she said.
She is very careful about the translations of her books into Spanish. “I work very, very closely with the translators because I want to make sure that the book sounds like me,” she said.
Besides the history of the war, Reyna studied Irish language and speech patterns to create the character of John Riley, who falls in love with the Mexican Ximena Salomé Benítez, even as he falls in love with Mexico.
An Irish historian helped her with speech and ideas from the time. “We would talk a lot about commonalities between Ireland and Mexico,” she told us.
Tips for writers
Reyna encourages new writers. “Everybody has a unique perspective of how they see the world, so by you sharing your perspective … your work is going to be in conversation with other works.”
She tells writers to work on their craft, to polish their drafts, and to have high expectations for themselves. She also recommends that they learn about the business side. “Even though we’re artists and we’re creating art, we’re also creating a product that’s going to be sold in stores with a price tag on it,” she said. “Make sure you educate yourself about the business and how it works, how you can promote yourself, how you promote your books.”
