Dissatisfaction
Imagine traveling thousands of miles through dangerous territory to reach what you thought was paradise, only to discover that you brought all your problems with you, and faced new problems at your destination. How would you feel? Would you become bitter and condemn your new surroundings as unwelcoming, brutal, and predatory? Would you long for the home you left behind, the friends and family that you would probably never see again?
Such is the story of many immigrants to other countries, those shining havens of freedom and light to which many disaffected people have flocked over modern history. Maybe humanity evolved to wander and expand into new territory, or perhaps the success of the species simply created pressure due to overpopulation and diminished resources that pushed those less fortunate to move. Whatever the cause, this displacement of people to other lands invariably creates friction between the established occupants of the new land and its novel immigrants, often to the point of disrupting both indigenous populations and newcomers.
Such is the story of present day immigrants to the United States, as depicted in Christina Henriquez’s novel The Book of Unknown Americans. This book collects the short histories of several supporting characters and longer first person accounts of principal characters to illuminate a community of immigrants in Wilmington, Delaware: mothers, fathers, and children. It attempts to put the reader in those people’s predicaments through their life stories, set against a backdrop of economic decline of the post 2008 financial crisis.
Henriquez pairs these two forms of disruption, social and economic, to heighten the tension of her plot. This presages the current climate, where political aspirants mine these disruptions for angst to fuel their careers. Currently, some citizens of the United States express their frustration by singling out immigrants as the cause of their many woes. This diffused form of scapegoating offers simple solutions to complex problems: build a wall, send them home, or lock them up. This age-old tactic tends to polarize the populace, gathering those in favor or those opposed to such rhetoric into easily manipulated groups.
Togotherness
One common trait that binds the people in these groups together is the perception of the other: people outside your group, unlike you, and easily singled out for either condemnation or sympathy. What nobody recognizes is that in reality there is no other, but only humanity in its various guises, differentiated by customs, skin color, and other superficial traits enforced upon people by their environments.
Isolation for much of prehistory created these differences as a way to adapt to particular circumstances, to confer some sort of advantage. In our modern global culture, with its enhanced mobility via improvements in transportation, as well as increasing pressures forcing mass migrations, these differences mark their bearers as foreign and therefore subject to scrutiny. Those traits no longer offer survival advantage, and conversely might place these outliers in peril.
People naturally seek access to resources, be it food, water, shelter, or procreative partners. They compete for these resources in times of scarcity, and seek dominance by excluding others from privileged positions of power. They also congregate into groups that seem most like themselves, out of instinct for herd protection.
Henriquez invites us into one such group, namely Latino immigrants from Central and South America. Together they share a common language and possibly common histories of hardship and turmoil that drove them from their homes in the first place, and their universal faith in the United States as a place they can earn greater wealth and prosperity. Ironically, these enclaves reinforce their sense of otherness by drawing invisible boundaries between them and the more established European immigrants that have adopted the language and customs of the majority. Never mind that they were once usurpers of native American lands.
Children as Bridges
How did previous immigrants assimilate the traits of the majority and become comfortable in the mainstream? Usually the young performed that service by learning the language and socializing with friends outside their family sphere. This generally offers a degree of hope for future generations, and allows older and less adaptable parents to endure their quasi-outcast status for the sake of their children.
In a perfect world, those children would be unmarked by their heritage and easily integrated into their new surroundings. Indeed, this represents the experience of most immigrants, especially those with white skin. Such predictable and natural trajectories do not make for dissonance, but harmony. While satisfying on one level, this does not make for a dramatic story. It does not reinforce the idea of otherness that Henriquez seeks to showcase.
Henriquez creates child characters that somehow fail in this assimilation role. She deliberately interrupts this progression to prolong the alienation of her principal characters, and drive home her message of cruelty and misfortune. She does this to engage her readers and elicit emotional reactions, especially from mainstream readers who have experienced parenthood and all its tribulations.
This diminishes the potential for character development in both the adolescents and adults. Instead of invoking enlightened responses from parents, she paints a rigid and highly claustrophobic social structure from which nobody can escape. That may reveal one of Henriquez’s objectives with the book, but it severely limits its psychological and deep human potential.
Narrative Compromise
Readers empathize with fictional characters that struggle against outside forces. We cannot help but reach out to an injured child, and Henriquez supplies us with a particularly tragic but beautiful young girl, Maribel, who suffers from a brain injury as the result of a fall from a high ladder. From an energetic and enthusiastic ten-year-old she becomes a withdrawn, silent, and developmentally arrested invalid, still able to walk and fulfill most body functions independently, but lacking in that spark or spirit she once had.
She begins to emerge from that shadowland with the help of her newfound friend and future romantic partner, Mayor. He recognizes her difference not as a stigma, but as an opportunity to establish a special level of trust. She does not judge him and he feels comfortable in her presence. Mayor has his own differences, which undermines his sense of self worth. He is not the athletic over-achiever that elevates his brother in the eyes of their father, and Mayor’s unsuccessful attempts at soccer leads to deception and the creation of a gulf between him and his parents.
While these two child characters play out their dramatic roles, those of the adults illustrate more mature challenges: securing a job, providing food and shelter, and learning the English language. None of these tasks prove to be easy. Their circumstances become just as desperate in their new homes as they were in their previous predicament in their countries of origin.
While Henriquez attempts to plumb the depths of Alma’s grief at the end of the book, her reporting of Alma’s actions seem cold and detached, as if Alma was writing about it rather than actually living it. We witness it rather than feel it, and the scene seems not intimate but an embarrassing episode of voyeurism. We are almost like the nosy neighbor who witnesses Maribel and Mayor’s most intimate moment.
Henriquez attempts to weave all of these trials, those of both the children and the adults, into a coherent narrative, but in the process dilutes the several themes: the plight of immigrants, hatred that descends to extreme violence, and the tragedy of childhood injury and doomed romance. She does this to promote emotional hooks as well as plot beats, but in the process loses the power and authenticity which each story could claim were they handled as separate, more sensitive novels.