White Space
Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, “What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?” While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn’t been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return—to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family’s history, and begin to make her own way.
Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents’ home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
De Leon (Don't Ask Me Where I'm From) explores her identity as a writer and a Guatemalan American in this affecting essay collection. The pieces are organized into three sections: the first, "Before," sees De Leon push back against expectations, as in "The White Ceiling," about taking birth control in a "mostly Catholic" culture. In the title essay, De Leon helps her father put his first résumé together and considers "what is in the white space outside the education, professional experience, skills categories, and how it is the richness of this white space that I want to explore." Inspired, she moves to Guatemala to write and gain a better understanding of the culture that her parents left. Essays in part two capture her travels, such as "Volcán Tajumulco," in which she hikes "the highest volcano in Central America," and "Los Monólogos de la Vagina" which describes a performance in The Vagina Monologues. The final section, "After," shines: the essay "Mother Tongue" explores the importance of sharing the Spanish language with her son, and "Bridged" poignantly describes the separation that education and opportunity can cause between generations. This empathetic, wide-ranging look at De Leon's growth as a thinker is a journey worth checking out.
