Summary

Book 1, “Mi Mamá Me Ama,” opens with a prologue that brings the reader back to 1980. Reyna Grande, the author and subject of this first-person memoir, introduces her two grandmothers: her terrifying paternal grandmother Abuela Evila and her kind maternal grandmother Abuelita Chinta. When she was four years old, she writes, she did not yet know about the United States, “a power that takes away parents,” which is referred to by people in her hometown of Iguala, Mexico, as “El Otro Lado, the Other Side” (3). The United States had already taken her father and soon it would be taking her mother too. In Chapter 1, Reyna and her eight-year-old sister Mago and seven-year-old brother Carlos say goodbye to her mother, who is going to El Otro Lado to join their father, who is trying to save enough money to build them a house in...