Telling an authentic immigration story
Bay Area author’s extensive research on the undocumented informs new novel
Given how many dramatic immigration stories Micheline Aharonian Marcom has heard over the years as a writer, educator and lifelong Californian — tales of Central American families fleeing violence, unaccompanied minors arriving desperate at the southern border and U.S. residents facing deportation after years of living and working in the Bay Area — it’s not surprising that she decided to make undocumented migration the subject of her seventh novel, “The New American.”
Growing up in Los Angeles — Marcom’s family emigrated from Saudi Arabia when she was a baby (her mother is ArmenianLebanese, her father American and Jewish) — she became aware at a young age of just how ubiquitous migration is in the personal histories of a population as diverse and foreignborn as California’s. (The state has almost a quarter of all the nation’s immigrants and 3 million of the country’s estimated undocumented population of 11 million.)
“So many families here have mixed (citizenship) status within them. I wanted to understand it better, ” Marcom told The Chronicle by phone from her home in Sausalito, where she plans to continue sheltering in place even when she goes back to teaching creative writing at the University of Virginia in the fall.
“I have known people in Emilio’s situation for a long time. He’s an American kid who, boom, is deported and suddenly alone in the world, far from the only place he’s called home.”
Marcom is referring to her clever, sensitive, utterly relatable young protagonist in “The New American,” out Tuesday, Aug. 18. Emilio is a composite based on numerous young men Marcom met during her three decades as a Berkeley resident working closely with immigrant communities, getting to know the traumas of displacement up close.
She taught Spanish and English as a second language at Berkeley High School and was assistant director of Mills College’s Upward Bound program, which helps prepare lowincome, firstgeneration students in Oakland for college.
In 2015, she founded the New American Story Project, a digital storytelling archive of firsthand testimonies by Central American migrants who fled to the U.S.
“I’ll never forget the first story I heard (in a Story Project interview) from a high school teenager, a young woman from Guatemala,” Marcom said. “The first thing out of her mouth was, ‘They came and they killed my father and I don’t know why, and then they tried to kill me.’
“When you hear someone’s story like that, you feel an incredible sense of urgency and a duty to be careful with it.”
Those video interviews, along with
her exhaustive research into Central American migration across Mexico, helped Marcom ensure the details of Emilio’s fictional background were realistic.
Emilio’s parents immigrated to the Bay Area from Guatemala and only told him when he turned 16 and wanted a driver’s license that he was undocumented. Despite living with the fear and humiliation of knowing “that he wasn’t a citizen and would always have to be cautious,” as Marcom writes, Emilio adapts to his new normal. He attends UC Berkeley on a California DREAM Act scholarship and is soaking up the joys of college life. He has a weekend job at Acme Bakery and is falling in love with a girlfriend he met in his intro to economics course.
All is well until Emilio is in a minor accident on the freeway while in a friend’s car after leaving a party. Unable to show valid identification, and outside Berkeley’s sanctuary city protections, the police report him to immigration authorities, and he’s taken into custody and jailed in a Richmond detention center. Within weeks, Emilio is deported in handcuffs and leg irons to Todos Santos, Guatemala.
Marcom’s emotionally piercing, compulsively readable novel begins when Emilio leaves his greataunt’s house before dawn and starts the epic journey north, determined to make it back home to Berkeley. He must travel 2,000 miles up the length of Mexico, including jumping on the roof of the infamous freight train La Bestia (a.k.a. the Train of Death) and walking across the punishing Sonoran Desert. Along the way, he meets new companions, even a lover, as well as vicious thieves and corrupt law enforcement.
“I didn’t make anything up in the book,” Marcom said. “Everything that happens to Emilio has happened to somebody in real life.” Her challenge as a novelist was writing responsibly about the migrant experience while giving herself aesthetic, imaginative license to “let Emilio’s story unfold as an archetypal journey.”
Marcom hopes readers of “The New American” will deeply consider the human toll of migration in the broadest sense, the fact that people’s need to flee unsafe conditions and find safe harbor elsewhere is as old as civilization itself, and yet asylum seekers are perpetually misunderstood, especially when the issue is politicized. (“Even our Lord Jesus Christ was a migrant at one time,” a character named Royo tells Emilio in the book.)
“I think about all the kids’ stories I’ve heard and how difficult it is to get asylum in this country,” Marcom said. “We can look back at history and think, ‘Remember that boat of Jewish children that was sent during the second world war, and was turned away? I would have done the right thing then.’ Well, we are a party right now for many complicated reasons to this extraordinary crisis happening in Central America and Mexico and the United States. I’m alive here and now, and this is happening in my country. I want to try to see it better, to understand it better.”