A debut novel is everything that ‘American Dirt’ wasn’t
Gabriela Garcia didn’t know it at the time, but she started writing parts of her debut novel when she worked as a migrant organizer.
It was 2014, and Garcia was fighting to keep detainees from being deported.
A few times she visited the women who were being detained in centers like Karnes County Residential Center and the South Texas Family Residential Center — the largest family immigration detention site in the U.S.
At the end of those days, Garcia gathered her observations into poetic vignettes, drawing on scenes and conversations with detainees. Years later, some made their way into her highly anticipated debut novel “Of Women and Salt.”
“I was not thinking about them as a book,” said Garcia, 36, in a recent video interview. “I think I was just trying to process a lot of it myself.”
Garcia wrote the bulk of the novel as her MFA thesis at Purdue University, where she studied with Roxane Gay, the bestselling author of “Hunger” and “Bad Feminist.”
The resulting work is a nonlinear, multigenerational narrative set in Cuba, Mexico and the U.S. about a lineage of prideful and resilient women bound together by legacies of survival and trauma.
Drawing on both research and personal ancestry, the novel seems to answer the call of many critics of last year’s muchhyped immigration thriller, “American Dirt” — for authentic stories that focus on unique and specific migrant journeys.
As a first-generation daughter of Cuban and
Mexican immigrants, Garcia grew up questioning what it means to be both here and there — to belong and be a foreigner in your home country. Frequent childhood visits to Cuba and Mexico led to a deep understanding of what she calls the “myth” of the prototypical immigration journey.
“I think that so much of the immigrant experience is shaped by class, race and circumstance,” she said.
The author thinks a lot about the forces and perspectives — personal, political and historical; conscious and unknowing — that shape us.
Those forces are at the root of her debut, which begins in 1866 in a cigar factory in Camagüey, Cuba, and jumps through space and time to Mexico and the present-day U.S., weaving together the lives of five generations of mothers and daughters.
There’s the story of
Ana, whose life changes forever after her mother is deported.
There’s Dolores, who does the unthinkable to protect herself and her child from her drunken, violent husband.
There’s Carmen, a Cuban immigrant processing a complicated relationship with her mother while raising her daughter, Jeanette, who’s battling addiction.
“Of Women and Salt” keeps its focus, always, on the women.
“I’ve been really shaped by growing up in a matrilineal family,” Garcia said. She was raised by a single mother after her parents divorced when she was in third grade. “My mother had all sisters, her mother had all sisters, I have all sisters.
“Many of the women in my family were also single mothers or single women who always supported each other, and we formed this really tight bond where I never felt like I was missing anything. That’s certainly something that I didn’t think about growing up but that shaped a lot of how I think of family.” It led to a book in which “when men do show up, they’re sort of at the periphery.”
The contemporary piece of the novel follows a woman much more like Garcia herself.
Jeanette also grew up in Miami and is Cuban American. She battles a drug addiction and a toxic romantic relationship. When Garcia was in high school, she, too, was in a toxic relationship, and she often got into trouble for “drug stuff.”
Sometimes Garcia found it more difficult to draw on her own life than her family’s struggles or the detained women she tried to help.
“I felt like I had to go to a dark and difficult place and think about my own relationships, my own experiences as a young woman,” she said. “But I often find that when I’m most scared, or when it feels most difficult to write something, that’s where the most interesting writing is.”