Conspicuous but invisible

~ The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henríquez ~

The title and the first few pages immediately tell you what the author is trying to accomplish here: tell the stories of Americans whose accomplishments rarely get attention, who both stand out and are invisible in mainstream America, whose hopeful journeys to a new country are similar to so many others, but who are often (especially these days) reviled and threatened and described in almost inhuman terms.

Two families form the center of the novel, while other immigrants surround them. The Riveras — Arturo and Alma — have a daughter, Maribel, 15, whose brain injury in Mexico left her passive, with poor short-term memory. They were told that American special-ed schools were the most likely to help, so Arturo took a job picking mushrooms in Delaware. A long truck drive later, they end up in a cheap apartment:

Two stories, made of cinder blocks and cement, an outdoor walkway that ran the length of the second floor with metal staircases at either end, pieces of broken Styrofoam in the grass, a chain-link fence along the perimeter of the lot, cracks in the asphalt.

An unlovely place where the nearest source of food is the gas station.

Everyone in the apartment complex is brown-skinned, a first-generation immigrant, and Spanish-speaking. One of these families is the Toros, who left Panama after the devastation of the American invasion. Enrique, their older son, is a basketball star with a full college scholarship. Mayor, the younger, is less lucky:

School had started two weeks earlier, and even though I had told myself that this would be the year the other kids stopped picking on me, the year that I actually fit in for once in my life, things already weren’t going as planned.

Mayor is the same age as Maribel, and immediately taken with her beauty as are most boys. A slow relationship develops between the two; unusual, because of Maribel’s limited conversation and because her parents never let her out alone. Yet Mayor finds pleasure in her quiet company, and she slowly becomes more responsive and interactive.

The only other teenager with a major role is Garrett Miller, and he is a caricature of the worst of white entitled American youth: sneering at the immigrants, bullying their kids, hassling Mayor, leering at Maribel and assaulting her. But then, given the way immigrants are described by some politicians these days, this turning of the tables hardly seems unfair.

The novel is told largely in the voices of Alma and Mayor, with alternating chapters in each voice. The author chose to intersperse additional chapters in the voices of other residents of the apartment complex: Benny Quinto, Gustavo Milhojas, Quisqueya Solis, Micho Alvarez, and so on. This, for me, was a mistake, as it stole the momentum from the main story. Some of the backstories were interesting, but I found myself skipping over these chapters especially towards the latter half of the novel.

Henríquez does a nice job of capturing the reactions of the immigrants to the new country. For them, America is far from a ‘promised land full of opportunity’, but is limited by the color of their skins and their English. They miss certain things about their home countries, while always conscious that those countries themselves have changed since they left.

We’re Americans now. I’m a line cook at a diner, and I make enough to provide for my family. Celia and I feel gratified when we see Enrique and Mayor doing well here. Maybe they wouldn’t have done so well in Panama. Maybe they wouldn’t have had the same opportunities. So that makes coming here worth it. We’re citizens, and if someone asks me where my home is, I say los Estados Unidos. I say it proudly.

[Rafael Toro, Mayor’s father]

There is a pleasing scene when the heating goes out and the residents gather in the Toros’ apartment for warmth. While they are all Spanish-speaking, they take joy in representing their various countries: Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Paraguay… it underscores both the similarities and the differences within the group.

This novel is heartfelt, but a limitation is that it shows only one face of American immigration: the model immigrant. The characters are all hardworking, devoted to their families, scrimping and saving to get by on miserable paychecks from backbreaking work. The author wrote the book in homage to her father, a Panamanian immigrant, and to give a voice to those like him whose stories are rarely told, and in that she has succeeded admirably.