Farmworker’s Daughter: Growing Up Mexican in America
by Rose Castillo Guilbault
Heyday Books, 164 pp., $20
Almost 20 years ago, Rose Guilbault gave this freshly minted college survivor his first professional break in journalism. Like my mother who referred me, Guilbault, at that time a television executive in San Francisco, belonged to the front-line generation of career women defining emancipation in the Seventies. Being Hispanic upped the empowerment quotient; in my case, family and race were likely the most significant accomplishments on the poorly proofed résumé Guilbault generously forwarded to an influential eldress at the local NBC radio affiliate. Farmworker’s Daughter: Growing Up Mexican in America knits familia y raza together into a deceptively simple, if unspoken, universal truth with all the homespun efficacy of Guilbault’s maternal brood spinning ghost stories in a Yaqui Indian adobe near Nogales, Mexico, where the author was born. In adolescence, Sears-catalogued “Books of Dreams” and the family’s first TV (“symboliz[ing] our connection to America”) eased a lonely only’s “psychological isolation in American culture” out in the lush farmlands of California’s Salinas Valley. Half a century later, the author’s warm, succinct way with words marks a career, and memoir, well staked. In the acknowledgements to Farmworker’s Daughter, Guilbault hands off the ledger: “To my daughters, Natalie and Jacquie, who carry the gift of storytelling, I hope they honor this family legacy by passing it on to their own generations.” Such is the immigrant song: Never break the chain. Gracias Rose, seguramente.This article appears in July 15 • 2005.
