The Book of Unknown Americans

“I felt acutely the meagerness of it, the insufficiency. We wanted more. We wanted what we had come here for.”

Alma already feels that her future is limited, as her husband is forced to take a job that is beneath him, one that denies him a break to eat or drink during the workday, and it is a struggle to get her daughter properly enrolled in school.

“Maybe I’ll make something. Something to remind me of home. But I didn’t have any of the ingredients I needed, so I just stood there, staring at the flat, cast iron pan, feeling homesickness charging at me like a roaring wave.”

Food connects the immigrant characters to home and identity. The recipes of home would offer Alma comfort and would help root her in her new setting as well, so her inability to cook as she would like highlights The Cultural Isolation of Immigrants in America.

“I wanted to believe him—because I wanted more than anything for her to be fine and fine and eventually better than fine, for her to transform again into the girl she used to be.”

All Alma’s hopes are pinned on Maribel transforming back into who she was beyond her fall. She has been told that only in the US, with the benefit of American special education programs, can this happen. She and Arturo have left a happy life behind in Mexico in search of this place where Maribel can eventually be “better than fine.”

“Celia gazed at me for a long time before she said, “When we left Panama, it was falling apart. Rafa and I thought it would better for the boys to grow up here. Even though Panama was where we spent our whole lives. It’s amazing, isn’t it, what parents will do for their children?” She put her hand on mine. A benediction. From then, we were friends.”

In this moment, the two women bond over their decisions to leave behind family and personal history in order to find a new and better way for their children. For Celia and Rafael, this decision meant enduring the sadness of leaving Panama behind to find a politically stable place to raise their family. For Arturo and Alma, the choice was to travel to a place where Maribel might get the education she needed to get well again. In both cases, the decision was rooted in trauma, highlighting The Myriad Forms of Trauma in the novel.

“English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open.”

During her English class at the Community Center, Alma is surprised by how radically she must reshape her mouth and her tongue to pronounce English words correctly. The sounds and syllables seem to her to be emblematic of the difference between the two cultures as well, one closed and one open.

“This year, she’d been the first in line in her polling place. She’d worn her American flag sweater and I’d seen her praying before she walked out the door that morning…When she came home, she said, “Well, I did my duty.”

Celia and Rafael both take pride in their status as citizens. In this moment, Celia is literally wrapping herself in the flag, in her USA sweater, in the hopes that Barack Obama will win and protect her and other marginalized people more fully.

“‘It’s in you,’ my dad assured me. ‘You were born in Panama. It’s in your bones.’ I spent a lot of time trying to find it in me but usually I couldn’t. I felt more American than anything but even that was up for debate according to the kids at school who taunted me over the years, asking if I was related to Noriega, telling me to go back through the canal.”

Mayor struggles with his identity as a first-generation American. According to his father, being born in Panama makes him truly Panamanian. Mayor doesn’t feel this connection, though. Instead, he feels simply American, though that is disputed by racist classmates.

“But I am grateful for these jobs. They allow me to send money to my children to pay for their schooling...My wish is that they’ll do something worthwhile with their lives, something more important than sweeping popcorn. I have done what I can for them. I would like to see them give something back.”

Gustavo’s life has been difficult, first in Guatemala, where he feared for his safety, and later in Mexico, where he was ridiculed for being half Guatemalan and later lost his wife to breast cancer. In his narrative, he talks about his two jobs in America, both at movie theaters, sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms. Though they seem demoralizing, he does it as a labor of love for his children. In this way, he resembles Alma, Arturo, Celia, and Rafael who have also made their decisions to immigrate with their children’s futures in mind.

“I missed my period. We had a hiccup of hope. Could it be? we thought. Nine months later we were holding her in our arms. Tiny starfish hands, ribs pushing up against her skin like piano keys. She wriggled and croaked. Our Maribel. ‘You won’t have another one,’ the doctor told us. But that didn’t matter. We had her.”

Alma relates the difficulties she experiences becoming pregnant. She and Arturo had nearly resigned themselves to not becoming parents when suddenly she became pregnant with Maribel. She was their one chance to have the child of their dreams. Even being told they wouldn’t have another child couldn’t take away the magic they felt in the face of her arrival in the world.

“They opened her head. They removed a piece of our daughter. And when it was over we realized that in that piece had been everything. Until then, I believed that a person inhabited his or her whole body. I had believed that a person’s essence was spread throughout them. Who could think that a person’s entire being is housed in a finger or in a hip bone or in a small piece of skull and that the rest of the body exists for appearances only?”

Following her fall from the ladder, Maribel undergoes surgery to relieve the swelling of her brain. Alma and Arturo are told it is the only way to save her, but afterward, she is not the same girl, even after the therapy and rehabilitation. The doctors tell Alma and Arturo that their only chance is to get her into the right kind of school—a school in America.

“This is how things went with him. One minute you were having a conversation and the next minute he was blowing up.”

Mayor’s relationship with his father is hampered by Rafael’s tendency toward overreaction and rage. Most of their arguments, this one included, center on their different versions of masculinity, developing the theme of The Dangers of Machismo. Sports knowledge and participation are essential from Rafael’s view. Mayor would like to be honest with his father and admit that he quit playing soccer, but his father’s erratic moods get in the way of honest communication.

“He did unspeakable things, all against my will. I don’t know why but he thought he could do whatever he wanted. That’s how boys are.”

At age 16, Quisaqueya is raped by her mother’s new husband’s son. Afterward, she tries to speak about these unspeakable things to her mother, who accuses her of being dishonest and ungrateful. Still traumatized, Quisaqueya views all men and boys as violent, dishonest, and dangerous. When she interferes in Maribel and Mayor’s relationship, she therefore may believe she is doing Maribel a favor and protecting her.

“Even so, I was a worrier by nature and I couldn’t escape the feeling that anything could happen to her at any time. As if because something terrible had happened to her once, there was more of a possibility that something terrible would happen to her again.”

Alma is desperate to save Maribel from any future danger. She is guilt-ridden after the accident and blames herself. When she is unable to protect Maribel from assault by Garrett, she blames herself all the more.

“I hadn’t told him what had happened. I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t want him to know that I had failed Maribel again.”

Alma blames herself for Maribel’s brain injury and blames herself again for Garrett’s attack on Maribel. She feels convinced she has failed her daughter a second time. For this reason, she doesn’t tell Arturo what occurred, her shame creating a rift in their marriage.

“I saw the family she would have one day and the food she would make for them. I saw her entire life in front of her, waiting.”

After the attack, Alma finds herself thinking back to a memory of Maribel before she fell from the ladder, one in which she made a meal for the family on her own. In that moment, Alma had such high hopes for her daughter, which centered on sharing food with loved ones. Now Alma is unsure whether it is even wise to hope.

“I talked myself into the idea that maybe my dad would be proud of me—just a little bit—when he found out I’d gotten into a fight. Maybe it proved I had a little bit of machismo in me after all.”

When Mayor gets in trouble for fighting at school, he wonders if perhaps his father will be proud of him—if he will have finally proven himself to be a man through violence. Even Enrique, the athlete, never got into a fight at school, he thinks to himself, so maybe his father will be impressed.

“If people tell me to go home, I just turn to them and smile politely and say, ‘I’m already home.’”

Fito, the landlord, is by far the most financially secure immigrant in the story but his narrative matches many of the others in that he took a long and circuitous route to get to where he is today. Though this is not the life he dreamed of for himself, it is a pleasant life and he feels at home in it. He tries to pay his successes forward by protecting his residents and making them feel like the building is their safe haven in an often racist and xenophobic world.

“The guys at the diner. That’s what they say. If you’re black or brown, they automatically think you’ve done something wrong.”

Though Rafael is excited to finally own a car after years of dreaming of one, he is too scared to drive it at the speed limit. He has been told that he will be profiled and harassed. The answer for Celia is to just try and blend in. As she explains to Mayor, that’s the way things have to be done in America.

“I remember there was an open call for Man of La Mancha at a small theater in Greenwich Village. I tried out for the role of the housekeeper. When I got there, a man was lining up all the girls. I remember I asked him whether it was okay that I wasn’t Spanish. He said, ‘What are you?’ I told him, ‘Puertorriquena,’ and he said, ‘What’s the difference?’”

Throughout the novel, many of the characters express their frustration at being conflated into a simplistic monolith. All Latinx people are assumed to be Mexican, they feel. They are all assumed to eat the same things, have the same culture, and share the same history. Nelia is proud of her heritage, as she announces at the beginning of her account. However, her experiences in the US have led her to believe that the cultural depth of her identity is invisible to most Americans.

“‘We didn’t do anything wrong, Arturo.’” He didn’t respond. ‘We’re not like the rest of them,’ I went on. ‘The ones they talk about.’ He unclasped his hands and looked at me, sad and weary. ‘We are now,’ he said.”

When Arturo loses his job and is unable to find a new one in 30 days, his visa becomes invalid. This is an enormous blow to Arturo and Alma, who both take pride in doing things the right way, not wanting to be like the stereotypical unauthorized immigrants they’d heard about. They have much to lose without their legal status, most especially the special schooling they came to the US for.

“We’re the unknown Americans, the ones no one wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them. And who would they hate then?”

The novel’s title derives from this observation by Micho, in which he analyzes the reason so many Latinx people in the US are rendered invisible. They are scapegoated. They are intentionally kept foreign and remote so they can be vilified. This process deprives them of their humanity and deprives other Americans of the connections they might make with immigrants who are truly not so unlike them.

“‘Do you hear me?’ Arturo asked. ‘Forgive yourself.’ I nodded and felt a distant sort of release, as if something inside of me was draining away.”

In the very last exchange before Arturo’s death, Arturo pleads with Alma to forgive herself. This is very much a sentiment Alma needs to hear, as she has long blamed herself for Maribel’s accident and has assumed that Arturo blamed her too. Knowing that he doesn’t hold her responsible for their daughter’s fall and everything that has resulted from it immediately frees Alma from the guilt she’s been suffering from.

“I stood there like an idiot, blinking. I felt—what? Nothing. The blankness of incomprehension. They shot him, I kept repeating to myself. They shot him.”

The senselessness of Arturo’s death is difficult for Mayor to process. Before hearing this news, Mayor imagined that a health crisis was what prompted his father to drive Maribel and him to the hospital. Without even knowing what has occurred and who fired the shot, Mayor correctly guesses that Garrett is involved.