Dear Harrison Candelaria Fletcher,
Finding Querencia should be handed to every child of immigrants and child of mixed descent in America. I would have given anything for a guiding light like this. Identity is a slippery thing to claim, and harder still in an age where we are asked on a near-constant basis to define our histories, cultures and personal narratives for the consumption of others. Even in the first line of this fan letter, I felt compelled to claim your work as belonging to people like me. Yet, is this not also a generalization and an erasure of your specific experience? Is it harmful for me, an Indian-American woman, to claim that my story is comparable to yours? What does it mean to stake a claim to an identity, and why can it sometimes feel like wearing someone else’s mask? These are exactly the questions you grapple with in this genre-expansive memoir that takes us through the acequias of New Mexico, the identity battlefields of a school playground, and deep into your own family’s history.
I am a real sucker for a genre-shifting memoir. Like the quandary of identity, the problem with genre is that it can limit the paths that a story can take and the meanings that a reader can pull from the text. This memoir resists those restraints by including elements of prose poetry, numbered lists, HR letters, dictionary entries, photo collage and hybrid structures that are totally unique to your writing. I especially love the structure of the “Conjugation” chapter in which each section begins with a question or phrase recited first in English and then in Spanish. These phrases are met with short vignettes about you and your daughter wrestling with questions of authenticity. In one section that hit me particularly hard, you write:
INGLÉS: “What are we?”
ESPAÑOL: “¿Qué somos?”
You asked your mother why she never taught you Spanish, and
she said you never wanted to know, which wasn’t right, the
never wanting, you just didn’t know what you wanted to know.”
I had to pause after reading those lines. In just a few sentences, you perfectly articulate the quandary of the second generation; the ones born into an entirely new country, culture, or context. We know that we are hungry for a connection to our family and our community, but we cannot find the language to ask for it. Neither the English nor the Spanish version of the question gets at what you really want to know, and yet they are the only tools you have. That is, until the final line of the chapter when your daughter throws yet another kind of language into the mix: “Your daughter texts you an emoji, without translation, before her first Latinx Club meeting: a dark gray disc, with silvery edges– a mask, a mirror, a moon.” One could see this ending as a kind of surrender to all the things that confound you about your identity, but I choose to see it as an embrace. Language may be flawed, but our desire to understand one another is not.
This memoir not only shifts wildly in genre, but also in time as you detail your childhood, your parents’ lives, and even your grandparents’ lives as your family moved across states and endured through history’s plot twists. Personal memories and familial histories flow seamlessly into one another so that time collapses and expands even within a single breath:
“you turn to your mother
you see her unseeing instead reliv
-ing gemstones gathered with
grandchildren and nieces a dif
-ferent story a different time each
of you seeking a different end the
wind between you smiles with
teeth the serrated horizon saws on
the bones of the visions you hold so
close to your chest you almost hear
them breathing your name . . .”
The result is a rich tapestry of the people and places that have shaped you. The memoir has a dreamlike quality that does not shy away from the visceral details of life, but expands them with sparkling lyrical prose. With so many jumps in time and shifts in genre, the motifs that run throughout this book provide helpful points of grounding. One particularly powerful motif is the coyote. Early on, you describe a coyote as one who “Runs from one town to another but belongs to neither. Marked by hybridity constantly negotiated.” In these descriptions, the coyote is haunted by the borders he runs through. There are many negative connotations heaped upon the coyote, including the slur for a mixed-race person, and their association with deceit and thievery. I could feel the weight of this word as it haunted you throughout your life, from awkward conversations at diversity conferences to heated exchanges with enraged readers of your work. Yet, living in the margins is not an inherently bad quality. It is only made that way by a society that refuses to accept nuance. Once you break through this illusion, you can see that life outside of binaries is rich with meaning. This is a sentiment you beautifully express in the “Coyote Cookbook” chapter which ends with an image of your mother making cinnamon bread, a food which shows you “what you try to believe that yes being mixed can be good.”
I have often struggled to explain what it is like to live as a person between identities. There is a desperation to be understood, mixed with nostalgia for a life you never lived, strung together by soul-stretching euphoria for all the cultures you contain, and a good measure of imposter syndrome thrown in. Finding Querencia perfectly encapsulates this experience without limiting or over-generalizing one’s experience. It is an astonishing feat that shows a great deal of bravery, care and patience. In my favorite meta moment from this stunning memoir, you write that your loved ones “don’t understand why you write the way you do: in fragments and run-ons and white spaces and multiple-shape shifting perspectives. Why, they ask, don’t you just come out and say what you mean? But you are, you reply. That’s what you mean.” Thank you, Mr. Candelaria Fletcher, for making meaning in this messy, gorgeously mixed world.
Your Fan,
Vahni Kurra
