Upon careful review, the Editorial Board of the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series recommends A Girl with the Sea in Her Eyes by Iris Gomez for publication through Black Lawrence Press.
About the Author
Iris Gomez is the author of the novel Try to Remember (Grand Central 2010), which won an International Latino Book Award and accolades from O, the Oprah Magazine and was selected as a Recommended Latino Book by the Association of American Publishers and a Top Ten Summer Read by Latina magazine, in addition to becoming a Boston Globe best-seller. She has authored two poetry collections, Housicwhissick Blue: Poetry of the Blue Hills Reservation (Edwin Mellen Press 2003) and When Comets Rained (CustomWords 2004), was awarded a Chicano-Latino Literary prize, and is published in journals and anthologies such as Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education (University of Nebraska Press 2014). A lawyer and nationally recognized expert on immigrants’ rights issues, Gomez has appeared on mainstream media and received awards from organizations such as the American Immigration Council, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the National Lawyers Guild, the Massachusetts Bar Association, the Massachusetts Hispanic Attorneys Association, and the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. She also serves on the board of a Boston-based foundation dedicated to racial justice. Profiles of her can be found in Mayra Calvani’s anthology Latina Authors & Their Muses (2015) and Peter Morton Coan’s Toward a Better Life (2011).
Artist’s Statement
Borders are fictions that Iris Gomez explores in her second novel, A Girl with the Sea in Her Eyes, in which a mixed heritage Latina (Colombian-Puerto Rican) searches for the meaning of home while healing from a broken heart and fragmented sense of identity. In lyrical prose that weaves together popular story-telling traditions with scholarly research, A Girl with the Sea in Her Eyes tells the story of a cast of filmmakers embarked on the quest for “Atlántica” – an almost mythical Latin American coastal territory with a shared littoral environment and Afro-Latin history and culture that transcends national borders. The legacy they rediscover embraces not only the historical, geographical, and environmental forces writ large but the common lexicon, sense of humor, cooking and musical traditions, artistries, and seaside life of the everyday people of Atlántica. A Girl with the Sea in Her Eyes is a book, ultimately, about the triumph of belonging through connection and community rather than the constructs of nationality that often create more harm than good. Gomez is a renowned immigrant rights attorney as well as a novelist and poet, and her book invites readers to reimagine the pathways to belonging in this complex, challenging world.
Excerpt
from Chapter 1 of A Girl with the Sea in Her Eyes
Once, not far from the Massachusetts Bay coast, stood a media casa, a half house, as my grandmother and I called it. The first owners had sawed the structure crudely down the middle, a living room walled off to separate us from the nicer half. Abuela Aguilda, my grandmother, had gotten a sunny kitchen and enough yard to grow hierba buena and cilantro in the thin city soil. She’d given me, her youngest grandchild, a humble valentine of a room, decorated with red-ribboned doilies. That, plus her stews and fritos, made our cartoon house on Mozart Street a real home—at least until the Atlantic trade winds took its soul back to the Caribbean.
I’d turned fifteen by the time we anchored in the media casa, my parents having rerouted us between Boston and the two places they were from—San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Cartagena, Colombia—for years. It was 1976, and whatever a homeland meant had changed so often for me that I had trouble catching up to the self I was supposed to be—a capricious destiny rising from the middle of my name, María Capricho Santiago. I resolved, when that final move to Abuela Aguilda’s house came, that I would belong to people instead of places.
Belong I did. Helping her keep house while my mother went on visiting-nurse rounds and my father worked translating gigs and organized tenants to fight their capitalist landlords, I joined Abuela on our own good deeds at the red-brick bank where Abuela held “office hours,” as my mother liked to joke. We helped newcomers open passbook savings accounts and deciphered confusing government letters for English-limited neighbors. Abuela’s elderly friends would gather there—waxing sentimental about the past gone by and anticipating their “Great Return” to Borinquen, the indigenous Taino name for the island from which my parents had first uprooted me. Too green yet to suspect that the Great Return might be but a fable in the migrant epic of displacement, I believed my elders’ stories and assumed that I, too, would return.