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A review by jennyshank
Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande
3.0
Reyna Grande’s Across A Hundred Mountains offers a human story behind the thousands of immigrants who cross illegally from Mexico to the United States each year. Although the book is fiction, the author’s personal experience informs her tale. According to the biography on her website, Grande, who now lives in California, “entered the U.S. as an illegal immigrant in 1985″ to join her parents when she was ten years old. Earlier this year, the book won the annual El Premio Aztlan Literary Award, started by New Mexico writer Rudolfo Anaya to honor Chicano literature.
Across A Hundred Mountains begins with a scene of devastating loss in a Mexican village. Nine-year-old Juana, her baby sister, and mother Lupe are stuck in their flooding shack, waiting for Juana’s father Miguel to return from his work as a campesino. Lupe goes to search for him, leaving Juana standing on the kitchen table holding her sister. Juana falls asleep while she waits for her parents to return, and the baby dies in the floodwater. The death of the baby sets off a chain of events that destroys the García family. When Miguel can’t pay the debt for the baby’s funeral, he decides to head to the United States to find work, leaving Lupe vulnerable to the rapacious town mortuary director, Don Elías.
The story of Juana is intercut with scenes from the perspective of Adelina, a Mexican American woman who works as a social worker in L.A. and travels to Tijuana to find out the truth about her father’s disappearance nineteen years earlier. In the first chapter, an old coyote leads her to her father’s remains, lying where he fell after a snake bit him during his attempt to cross into the U.S. After Lupe is reduced to a raving alcoholic due to grief caused by the deaths of three of her children, Juana embarks on a journey in the opposite direction to find her father in the U.S.
Grande’s prose is spare and simple, and its clarity is often beautiful, such as in this description of Juana’s neighborhood in which she remembers walking with her father, whom she calls Apá:
“They ran down the street, Apá pulling her behind him like a kite. She knew they were almost home when the cobbled stones were replaced with dirt and pebbles. And the rows of pink, blue, yellow, purple, and green concrete houses became shacks growing out of the earth. Little shacks made out of bamboo sticks and cardboard, some leaning against one another like little old ladies tired after a long walk.”
Plot and structure rather than nuanced characterization are the primary strengths of Across A Hundred Mountains. Although Juana, Adelina, and Lupe are given complexity, the supporting characters tend to be wholly good or evil, such as the leering, corpulent Don Elías who ultimately makes Lupe pay her debt by having sex with him, and Don Elías’ silent, childless wife who “just sat there, knitting baby clothes she donated to the church.” But villains like these help to propel the plot, providing as many dramatic twists and turns as can be found in a telenovela, making the book go down easily in one sitting.
What is more striking than the influence of villains on the lives of the García family is the harsh consequences of their poverty and the indifference most of the people they encounter have toward their plight. It’s expensive to be poor, their indebtedness compounding every woe, ultimately forcing Juana to become a prostitute for a while in Tijuana until she can raise enough money to hire a coyote to lead her across the border. She and others in her position are treated as something less than human, the money-minded coyote ready to abandon them in the desert if the immigration authorities turn up or if they move too slowly. The simple description of Juana’s desert crossing attempt is riveting, and the perils make it evident that only a person who is so desperate to reach the U.S. that she would be willing to give up her life to do so ever embarks on such a journey.
With “Across A Hundred Mountains” Reyna Grande has humanized the lightning-rod topic of illegal immigration by telling the story of one embattled family.
Published in New West, August 2007.
Across A Hundred Mountains begins with a scene of devastating loss in a Mexican village. Nine-year-old Juana, her baby sister, and mother Lupe are stuck in their flooding shack, waiting for Juana’s father Miguel to return from his work as a campesino. Lupe goes to search for him, leaving Juana standing on the kitchen table holding her sister. Juana falls asleep while she waits for her parents to return, and the baby dies in the floodwater. The death of the baby sets off a chain of events that destroys the García family. When Miguel can’t pay the debt for the baby’s funeral, he decides to head to the United States to find work, leaving Lupe vulnerable to the rapacious town mortuary director, Don Elías.
The story of Juana is intercut with scenes from the perspective of Adelina, a Mexican American woman who works as a social worker in L.A. and travels to Tijuana to find out the truth about her father’s disappearance nineteen years earlier. In the first chapter, an old coyote leads her to her father’s remains, lying where he fell after a snake bit him during his attempt to cross into the U.S. After Lupe is reduced to a raving alcoholic due to grief caused by the deaths of three of her children, Juana embarks on a journey in the opposite direction to find her father in the U.S.
Grande’s prose is spare and simple, and its clarity is often beautiful, such as in this description of Juana’s neighborhood in which she remembers walking with her father, whom she calls Apá:
“They ran down the street, Apá pulling her behind him like a kite. She knew they were almost home when the cobbled stones were replaced with dirt and pebbles. And the rows of pink, blue, yellow, purple, and green concrete houses became shacks growing out of the earth. Little shacks made out of bamboo sticks and cardboard, some leaning against one another like little old ladies tired after a long walk.”
Plot and structure rather than nuanced characterization are the primary strengths of Across A Hundred Mountains. Although Juana, Adelina, and Lupe are given complexity, the supporting characters tend to be wholly good or evil, such as the leering, corpulent Don Elías who ultimately makes Lupe pay her debt by having sex with him, and Don Elías’ silent, childless wife who “just sat there, knitting baby clothes she donated to the church.” But villains like these help to propel the plot, providing as many dramatic twists and turns as can be found in a telenovela, making the book go down easily in one sitting.
What is more striking than the influence of villains on the lives of the García family is the harsh consequences of their poverty and the indifference most of the people they encounter have toward their plight. It’s expensive to be poor, their indebtedness compounding every woe, ultimately forcing Juana to become a prostitute for a while in Tijuana until she can raise enough money to hire a coyote to lead her across the border. She and others in her position are treated as something less than human, the money-minded coyote ready to abandon them in the desert if the immigration authorities turn up or if they move too slowly. The simple description of Juana’s desert crossing attempt is riveting, and the perils make it evident that only a person who is so desperate to reach the U.S. that she would be willing to give up her life to do so ever embarks on such a journey.
With “Across A Hundred Mountains” Reyna Grande has humanized the lightning-rod topic of illegal immigration by telling the story of one embattled family.
Published in New West, August 2007.