San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A Cuban, American saga
“Of Women and Salt,” the debut novel by Oakland writer Gabriela Garcia, is only about 200 pages long. But it has the feel of a sweeping family saga that’s hard to reconcile with its slender profile.
The novel even begins with a helpful family tree (a sure sign of a family saga), diagramming five generations of Cuban and Cuban American women, starting with Maria Isabel in a Cuban cigar factory in 1866 and ending with Jeanette in modernday Miami. The women are bound across time by calamity — men who treat them badly, political violence and oppression, impossible choices, as well as more contemporary struggles like opioid addiction and the treacheries of modern immigration and family separation.
Although the story is multigenerational, the novel really belongs to Jeanette, a young Cuban American woman who is fighting addiction and chafing against her mother, Carmen, who has carried a terrible secret with her from Cuba to the United States.
One sleepless night, Jeanette looks out the window of her trailer and witnesses ICE taking away her neighbor in handcuffs. “This is what she knows about the neighbor woman: likely in her 30s, likely Central American, comes home each evening around six or seven.” She feels bad for the woman, but the woman’s problems are distant from Jeanette’s own — just another misfortune in a world of them.
The neighbor, it turns out, is Gloria, an undocumented woman from El Salvador, and when ICE takes her, they accidentally leave behind her young daughter, Ana. Jeanette takes Ana in when it becomes clear that no one else is coming. But at Carmen’s urging — “You’re on — Jeanette decides to call the police and let them figure out what to do with poor, leftbehind Ana.
From here, the novel splits in two, and Garcia, a former migrant rights organizer, takes us on Gloria’s harrowing journey through detention, legal bullying, deportation and exploitation while Jeanette ventures to Cuba for the first time to learn the truth about the family history her mother will never speak about.
While Gloria’s agonizing story of modern immigration has a rippedfromtheheadlines feel of authenticity, the novel is richest when it delves into Jeanette’s family’s past and present in Cuba. Her ancestors’ lives are intimately entwined with the history of Cuba, and the writing in these chapters is lusher, less set on making a point, and more engaged in the particulars of telling a great story.
As the novel moves through time and place, Garcia explores how the political is always personal and how generations of women can pass along both strength and sorrow. At its heart, “Of Women and Salt” is a sad, deeply American story about the pieces of self people leave behind on their journeys to become “Americans.”