Cristina Henriquez’s The
Book of Unknown Americans is the story of a group of immigrants, some of
whom came to America legally and some who did not, who live in the same
Delaware apartment building. They are
from places like Mexico, Guatemala, and Panama, and to each other, they do not
always seem to have a lot in common. But
what they most certainly do have in common is the single most important thing
about them: they are in the United States to create better lives for themselves
and their children. They are among the
bravest and the most desperate of people.
Henriquez tells their story through two principle voices:
Alma, a young Mexican mother; and Mayor, a Panamanian teen who falls in love
with Alma’s daughter. In addition to
these two narrators, numerous minor characters are given voice in short bursts
of first person narration interspersed between the alternating chapters from
Alma and Mayor.
Alma and her husband have just arrived from Mexico with
their daughter Maribel, a beautiful teenager suffering the effects of a
traumatic brain injury she suffered there.
Having come to the U.S. legally, they are here strictly to get Maribel
the kind of special schooling that is not available to her in their home
country. Mayor’s family, on the other
hand, left Panama years earlier when his parents decided that Panama was too
dangerous a place in which to raise a family.
The family has been in the U.S. long enough now that Mayor and his older
brother think of themselves as Americans, not as immigrants from Panama.
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| Cristina Henriquez |
As different as the residents of the building are, they function
more as an extended family than as a bunch of people who just happen to live in
the same apartment building. New
residents, most of whom barely speak English, are quickly taken under the wings
of those who have been in the building long enough to understand all subtleties
and shortcuts associated with their shared situation. On weekends, the families sometimes gather
for meals where the men tell “war-stories” about their jobs, the women tell
stories about their children, and televised soccer matches blare in the
background.
The Book of Unknown
Americans, while it does effectively put human faces on a few of the often
indistinguishable thousands of Latin Americans immigrating to the U.S. each
year, paints such an idealized picture of them that it loses much of its impact
and sense of realism. Unfortunately,
this gives the novel just enough of a one-sided feel that many of its
characters become more stereotypical than authentic. Alma, Maribel, and Mayor, though, are such
sympathetic characters that their story is an interesting one worth reading.
