9781451661781

"A brutally honest bookâ€¦akin to being the Angela's Ashesof the modern Mexican immigrant experience" ( Los Angeles Times). When Reyna Grande's father leaves his wife and three children behind in Mexico to make the dangerous trek across the border to the United States, he promises he will soon return from "El Otro Lado" (The Other Side) with enough money to build them a dream house. As months turn into years, his promises become harder to believe. Eventually he summons his wife to join him, and Reyna and her siblings remain in Mexico in the already overburdened household of their stern, unsmiling grandmother. When their mother returns, the reunion sets the stage for a dramatic new chapter in Reyna's young life: her own journey to "El Otro Lado" to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for yearsher long-absent father. In this heartbreaking, groundbreaking memoir, award-winning writer Reyna Grande brings to life her tumultuous early years, capturing all the confusion and contradictions of childhood torn between two parents and two countries. The Distance Between Usreminds us that the joys and sorrows of childhood are always with us, invisible to the eye but imprinted on the heart, forever calling out to us of those places we first called home.

TERM	PRICE	DUE
SEMESTER	$10.00	Dec 13
QUARTER	$10.00	Aug 16
SHORT TERM	$10.00	Jul 03

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author, motivational speaker, and writing teacher. As a girl, she crossed the US–Mexico border to join her family in Los Angeles, a harrowing journey chronicled in The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist that has been adopted as the common read selection by over twenty schools and colleges and fourteen cities across the country. Her other books include the novels Across a Hundred Mountains, winner of a 2007 American Book Award, and Dancing with Butterflies, and The Distance Between Us, Young Reader’s Version. She lives in Woodland, CA with her husband and two children. Visit ReynaGrande.com.

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Prologue

Reyna, at age two

MY FATHER’S MOTHER,Abuela Evila, liked to scare us with stories of La Llorona, the weeping woman who roams the canal and steals children away. She would say that if we didn’t behave, La Llorona would take us far away where we would never see our parents again.

My other grandmother, Abuelita Chinta, would tell us not to be afraid of La Llorona; that if we prayed, God, La Virgen, and the saints would protect us from her.

Neither of my grandmothers told us that there is something more powerful than La Llorona—a power that takes away parents, not children.

It is called The United States.

In 1980, when I was four years old, I didn’t know yet where the United States was or why everyone in my hometown of Iguala, Guerrero, referred to it as El Otro Lado, the Other Side.

What I knew back then was that El Otro Lado had already taken my father away.

What I knew was that prayers didn’t work, because if they did, El Otro Lado wouldn’t be taking my mother away, too.

Prologue

IN 2010, TWENTY-FIVEyears after my new life in the United States began, my father was diagnosed with liver cancer. By then, my siblings and I had little communication with him. By then, he’d managed to chase us away. But as is often the case with terminal illnesses, broken families put themselves back together, and I began to find my way back to my father, although the journey—like the one I took across the U.S.-Mexico border—was not at all easy.

On Tuesday, September 6, 2011, the day before my thirty-sixth birthday, Mago, Carlos, and I found ourselves around my father’s hospital bed listening to the doctor tell us he had done everything he could for him. The doctor said we should let our father go.