New West Book Review

A White Girl Embraces Mexican Culture in “Gringa”

By Jenny Shank, 1-22-10

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood
by Melissa Hart
Seal Press, 276 pages, $16.95

Eugene-based writer and University of Oregon journalism teacher Melissa Hart‘s new memoir investigates a childhood complicated enough to merit repeated examination: Gringa is her second childhood memoir, after 2005’s The Assault of Laughter.  Both address the defining incident of her young life: when Hart was in third grade, her mother Maggie recognized she was a lesbian, fell in love with her son’s school bus driver, and took her three kids from their father and their “upper-class gated community” in Southern California, moving them to Oxnard, a predominantly Mexican-American community.  “You can’t grow up parented by two women,” Hart’s father declares, “it’s unnatural.” The judge agrees, granting custody of the children to Hart’s father with two weekends of visitation to her mother a month.

A description of these events sounds rather sensationalistic, but Hart’s strength in Gringa is how natural she makes it all seem.  She recreates the world of 1970’s Southern California for the reader, complete with her mother’s blue VW Bus with “red plaid curtains and eight-track tape player,” blasting Peter, Paul & Mary, a symptom of Maggie’s desire to “return to ‘60s bohemia.” Hart’s descriptions of music, clothing, and food ground the book in the changing pop culture of the decades it spans.

The memoir cycles around the food Hart eats or the food she wants to eat.  Maggie’s 1970’s recipe for her own creation, Tortilla Flats—corn tortillas with shredded cheese, olives and chilies—evokes the time when white Americans were beginning to become intrigued by Mexican food but hadn’t yet mastered the authentic particulars.  Hart intersperses recipes throughout the book, written in wry fashion, such as the one for “White Girl Cookies”: “Ponder your sentence of a lifetime of despair, then preheat your oven to 325 Fahrenheit.”

As the book opens, Hart’s mother Maggie has begun spending a lot of time with Patricia Sanchez, the bus driver for her developmentally disabled son, Tim.  Maggie signs up for Spanish lessons with Hart, and thus begins Hart’s childhood-long romance with the Spanish language, Mexican food, and Spanish-speaking people.

Hart’s fascination with Mexican culture derives from her longing to fit in somewhere, given her unconventional family situation.  After an Italian-American girl observes, “It must be hard to be a WASP in Los Angeles,” Hart writes: “At twelve, I’d begun to learn who I was by who I wasn’t.  I wasn’t Italian or black or Mexican.  I wasn’t Catholic or Jewish or Protestant.  I wasn’t tan or pretty or cool.” Although she accepts Maggie’s lifestyle, Hart doesn’t tell her friends that her mother is a lesbian, and doesn’t bring them to either home.  In high school, Hart prefers hanging out at the crowded, chaotic home of her Ecuadorian-American friend instead of at her father and stepmother’s carefully decorated tract home.

Hart’s stepmother is, refreshingly, portrayed in a winning light—she’s a kind homemaker who enjoys cooking gourmet food, looks like a “supermodel” in her red bikini, and assumes the role of surrogate mother with grace.  But throughout her childhood and adolescence, Hart pines for her own mother for many reasons: they share a similar spirit of adventure that Hart’s father lacks, Maggie lives in a multiethnic neighborhood that’s more appealing to Hart, and Hart’s father can be frighteningly volatile.

Hart pursues her interest in Mexican-American culture with abandon throughout her childhood and young adulthood, befriending Latinos and hanging out at their houses and parties, and finding a Mexican-American boyfriend when she is in college.  They move in together and date for over a year before Hart realizes the relationship isn’t working—he’s uneducated and his family enforces strict gender roles, segregating women from men at gatherings.  Hart’s attempts to fit in with her boyfriend’s family are funny, especially the ill-advised Christmas tree costume she wears to their holiday party.

Gringa is a breezy, agreeable read, written in clear, detailed prose.  Hart is consistently honest about embarrassing experiences and always takes the opportunity to make fun of herself when it arises.  The book culminates in an enjoyable episode, a mother-daughter trip to Spain that goes awry.  The only drawback to the ending is that Hart never discusses whether she has moved past her crush on the Spanish language and Mexican culture, or if she has incorporated it into her adult life.  Perhaps she’s saving that story for her next memoir.

Melissa Hart will present the discussion “Write and Sell Humorous Short Essays” at Tsunami Books in Eugene on February 4, 6:30-9 p.m.

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