An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure
March 27, 2023
In this inventive memoir, Lopez (Kamby Bolongo Mean River) examines his blurry lineage in short, episodic bursts. When Lopez’s grandfather left Puerto Rico for Brooklyn in the 1920s, he and his young family assimilated to American culture, leaving Lopez with little information about their history when he was born five decades later: “What I don’t know about my family is almost everything. A permanent amnesia, local and global.” Instead, Lopez built a community among a diverse group of fellow tennis players, making his way across the tennis courts of a Brooklyn that would have been unrecognizable to his grandfather. To fill in the gaps of his history, Lopez muses about how his family might have turned out had they resisted assimilation and imagines his grandfather’s life in the early 20th century, populating a fictional “Puerto Nowhere” with his conclusions (“Puerto Nowhere is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and extends as far north as Canada and south to Chile. The eastern and western borders are boundless”). He also uses that imaginary setting to dissect the ways immigration, gentrification, and policy have transformed real-life Brooklyn over the last century. Throughout, Lopez is candid and funny, a winning guide through his individual history and a thoughtful examiner of more complicated diasporas. This will resonate with anyone who’s ever had to dig through their own past.
June 10, 2024
Novelist Lopez's (A Better Class of People) episodic memoir is as shifting and layered as the murky familial history that he explores. Realizing that he knows nearly nothing about his family's background, Lopez learns about his Puerto Rican grandfather Sixto Lopez, who immigrated to the continental United States in the 1920s. Sixto's efforts at giving his children and grandchildren a home resulted in the erasure of their Puerto Rican heritage and language. Lopez is chagrined at having no family stories and knowing so little Spanish. Confronted with this lack, he invents imagined bits of family history and newly minted backstories to fill in the gaps. Some listeners may find the book's format choppy, as it is presented in short bursts. Still, each new dispatch reveals new facets of Lopez's internal struggles--frustration at being Puerto Rican but not feeling Puerto Rican and sadness at the lost opportunities to connect with the past. Narrator Lee Osorio gives voice to Lopez's complicated feelings, including the unmitigated joy that he feels when immersing himself in a new community, playing tennis with a variety of players in Brooklyn. VERDICT Share with listeners looking for a creative blend of memoir and fiction, grounded by humor and regret.--Laura Trombley
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