Reyna Grande, author: ‘Trying to find the joy is an act of resistance’

The literary career of author Reyna Grande has been defined by her trauma. At 50 years old and two decades after her first publication, every new book, whether fiction or non-fiction, has been permeated by her experiences as a Mexican immigrant who, at nine years old, left behind poverty in Iguala, Guerrero, for a difficult adolescence of assimilation in California. There, she reintegrated into a broken family marked by her father’s alcoholism and abuse. From “poking at the wound” so much, Grande began to fear that she had developed a fixation and, at the same time, commodified her trauma.

“I had to ask, how have I wrapped my whole identity around my trauma? Have I tied my creativity to my trauma? In that every time I write, that’s all that comes out of me. ... I really wanted to interrogate where my fixation with my trauma comes from and how it has impacted me on a personal level but also professionally,” Grande explains, in an attempt to describe Migrant Heart (2026, Atria Books), her latest book published this week simultaneously in Spanish (Penguin Random House) and English.

At once a continuation of her work and a break from it, the book is a collection of 18 personal essays, where she again looks at her most intimate experiences, but now shares measured reflections alongside the narration of events. Furthermore, she does so in a format she is exploring for the first time, innovating creatively with texts that take the form of a play, a dictionary, or an almanac.

It is the product of a psychological endeavour. “I wanted to see what I could do to start to walk back from that... How can I retrain my mind so that it’s not just constantly replaying the trauma in my head, but where I can now start looking at my experiences and focusing more on the positive things of those experiences, on the joy of those experiences? And so I was doing it for my mental health and also professionally. I want to start writing differently,” explains the author.

Despite her hardships, she became the first in her family to attend university. Over time, she has become a recognized voice in American literature with her novels — Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing with Butterflies, and the historical epic A Ballad of Love and Glory — and memoirs — The Distance Between Us and A Dream Called Home — which rawly portray the immigrant experience, border identity, and her own life.

In Migrant Heart, Grande “pokes at the wound” again, sharing for the first time sexual abuse by a stepbrother and continuing to explore the dehumanization of the immigrant community, which is impossible to ignore in the current U.S. political climate.

But the book strikes a different tone from her previous ones: there is an explicit search for healing. “I think that’s why trying to find the joy is an act of resistance, because the world is constantly retraumatizing us with the things that are happening right now in the country. The acts of violence being inflicted upon our communities can trigger collective depression,” she notes.

In this way, despite focusing once again on some of her traumatic life experiences, the book is full of small moments of humanity and happiness: from a new memory of her marriage to the joy she finds in small activities like tending her garden, painting, or sewing, and the enormous satisfaction she gets from her daughter’s natural bilingualism — something denied to Grande, who was forced to almost forget Spanish to feel she could integrate into U.S. society.

The trauma of language is the theme of one of the essays and is also a part of the book itself, which is published in both languages at once. Grande writes in English, the language in which she is most educated — she says that her Spanish remained at a sixth-grade level, the level of her mother’s education, once she migrated to the United States — but she supervised the translation and opted to rewrite sections of the Spanish version to recover her own voice. She wanted the reader to feel like they were having a conversation with her.

Regarding how her work inevitably relates to the political situation, the drama of deportations, open racism, and attacks on the migrant community, Grande doesn’t shy away from the term “activism”: it’s something she actively participates in. “I think writing is an act of activism. Obviously, I didn’t see that when I was a younger writer. I wasn’t writing to be an activist. It was more of a process of me discovering how writing could be used as a powerful tool for social justice and to create social change,” she says in a video call from Santa Cruz, California, where she has begun a months-long tour across the country to promote the book.

The power resides in controlling the narrative. “When we’re writing our own stories, we’re pushing back against what society says about us. And so, it can also be empowering to do that. Every book I have written has been an act of rebellion against the powers that be. And it has also been an act of celebration for my immigrant community. It has helped me to transform a lot of the shame that society made me feel about my immigrant identity into something else, where I say, ‘No, these experiences should be part of American literature because the immigrant story is the American story,” she says.

Even so, Grande moves between the visibility and vulnerability that comes with opening herself through her writing, and the seeming safety, yet quiet erasure, that accompanies the de facto invisibility of being an immigrant in the United States. “As people of color, we’re constantly having to navigate those two, where sometimes it’s safer to be invisible, not to draw attention to ourselves, like right now. But when we remain in the shadows, it also means our voices are not heard. I don’t have an answer, but it’s what I’m trying to write about, what we must navigate as people of color, as immigrants,” she reflects.

That may be the reflection, but in practice, this writer isn’t hiding. Today, perhaps more than ever, Reyna Grande is an open book — one in which she hopes many will recognize themselves, so that healing and resistance can be shared rather than borne alone.

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