"As formerly poor women now working as writers in and out of the academy, the gifts we bring are an angle of vision and a will for change," Joy Castro writes in her incredibly heart-wrenching and empowering book of essays, "Island of Bones" (University of Nebraska Press, $16.95 paperback).
To illustrate, Castro mines deep into the history of Cuban immigration -- how as far back as the 1870s, a Cuban "working-class community of skilled and unskilled laborers" began settling on Cayo Hueso (now Key West), which meant "isle of bones."
Her family traces its roots to that island, despite the "public narrative" that prominent Cuban exiles in 1959 were the first wave of migration. That public narrative, she observes, remains unshakable because it's not complicated: "It helps if you're simple to sum up."
She applies that process of investigation to her own hidden history.
She was adopted by a Cuban couple, Jehovah's Witnesses, who insisted on prescribing her destiny with their faith. But her discovery that her birth mother was a white Midwesterner sent her spiraling into an identity crisis.
And growing up with an abusive stepfather in a trailer, "where we ate dry pancakes for dinner and wore strangers' clothes dug out of trash bags," she knew she would have no chance at an education or a future outside of poverty, if she didn't escape.
None of these life-altering conditions (which are the basis of her previously published memoir, "The Truth Book") are visible on the skin of a self-identified Latina whose many roles include university professor and mentor, yet they can cause plenty of emotional damage, and they can also fuel a woman's resolve to better herself and be the agent of her own salvation.
For Castro, who worked her way through college while nursing a son, the defining moment happened when she realized that "testimony could mean something besides the scary, throat-pounding experiences I'd had in courtrooms, lawyers' offices, and judges' chambers."
On the page, she found a space to come to terms with her past, and with her present situation: being a middle-class professional with working-class sensibilities, and with the anxiety of "not belonging" that lingered as she moved successfully through tenure, through the publication of her first book.
Castro concludes: "For me, all the myths have come undone. I don't fit. I don't fit, and that's okay, and that's where I write from: that jagged, smashed place of edges and fragments, and grief, of feeling lost, of perilous freedoms." That disorientation is called the human condition; Castro's willingness to find her own path through writing (instead of remaining lost in history, memory and identity) is called a saving grace.
The essays in "Island of Bones" piece together an inspiring journey that challenges assumptions, statistics and long-held beliefs that shape the "public narrative" of a U.S. Latina. Indeed, through lives like Castro's, the public narrative expands to include stories of strength, perseverance and, apropos of the author's name, joy.
Rigoberto González is an award-winning writer living in New York City. His website is rigobertogonzalez.com, and he may be reached at Rigoberto70@aol.com.