The Distance Between Us

by Reyna Grande

The current popularity of Spider-Man and other comic book heroes flooding film, television, novels, and games tells me a lot about us as a nation and our intense need for a superhero to rescue us from our super fears, a prescription for our times. Stories, after all, are medicine.

am an “undocumented success story” now. I am the candy girl who escaped her poverty, who didn’t get locked up, who didn’t get deported. I’m the girl living the dream.

But above all, I want all immigrants to be treated with respect and with the dignity they deserve.

Like most immigrants, my father had left his native country with high expectations of what life in El Otro Lado would be like.

he had been faced with two choices: return to Mexico empty-handed and with his head held low, or send for my mother. He decided on the latter, hoping that between the two of them, they could earn the money needed to build the house he dreamed of.

It made me angry to hear her say those words: My husband needs me. As if my father were not a grown man. As if her children didn’t need her as well.

I clutched at the thin material of Mami’s flowery dress and wished I could stay there forever, tucked into its folds, wrapped in the safety of my mother’s shadow.

“It doesn’t matter that there’s a distance between us now. That cord is there forever.”

had to keep on believing my parents left me because they loved me too much and not because they didn’t love me enough.

As the oldest, it was clearer to Mago, more than to Carlos and me, that the distance between us and our parents was destroying our relationship more than any of us could have imagined. And the consequences would be great.

And now he had returned to us a different version of my mother, one who was bitter, heartbroken, and weighed down by the knowledge that she had four children to support and was on her own.

wasn’t old enough to understand that Mami was two people in one: a woman who wanted to be loved by a man, and a

mother who wanted to do right by her children.

I thought of Mami dancing in the record shop, and I promised myself that was how I would always think of her, and I would try to forget that other mother, the one who left and left and left.

I am grateful now that back then I was too young to fully grasp the extent of the danger we were in. I am glad I did not know about the thousands of immigrants who had died before my crossing and who have been dying ever since.

I didn’t know what it was about Papi that sometimes he could be nice, and other times, like when he was drinking, he would become a different person, one who yelled and hit. That father scared me.

I stood there in Mrs. Giuliano’s backyard feeling as if I were tearing in half. Where do I belong? I wondered. Do I belong here? Do I belong there? Do I belong anywhere?

Immigration took a toll on us all.

One day, I promised myself, thinking about Mr. López’s words, I will write a book that won’t be rejected, one that will make my father proud.

Those books gave me a glimpse into a world I wished to belong to, where there were no alcoholic fathers, no mothers who left you over and over again, no fear of deportation. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. That world was the perfect place I had imagined the U.S. to be.

Looking back on it now, I realize that first short story of mine would set the tone for all my other stories—stories of broken families, absent parents,

and siblings that were separated—for that was the world I lived in, the world I knew.

My father’s acceptance of me had become my sole reason for being.

We were already living in some kind of Hell in this strange place of broken beauty.

I didn’t know then just how

much my relationship with my father would affect my relationship with other men. I didn’t know that my need to be loved by him—and his inability to show affection—would make me desperate to find it elsewhere. The more he denied me his love, the more I would seek it in the boys I would meet.

My father and mother were not there. But Mago was. And her presence, as always, filled the void of my parents’ absence.

She continued to provide the emotional support we needed.

As I walked away from Meche’s house, I realized there was something else I had lost the day I left my hometown. Even though my umbilical cord was buried in Iguala, I was no longer considered Mexican enough. To the people there, who had seen me grow up, I was no longer one of them.

How could she just sever the ties that bind us to this place, to these childhood friends of ours who weren’t able to escape this poverty like we did?

How did Cisneros know that was exactly how I had felt for many years? Just wishing my feet could keep walking, keep walking to another place, to a beautiful home where I was loved and wanted.

Those books, like The House on Mango Street, proved a revelation. There were people out there who understood, who experienced the things I was going through. Diana planted a seed inside me, and through those books, the seed soon began to grow.