“I feel like this project opened up my immigrant wound.”
Dr. Lilia Soto reflects on the lessons of transnational girlhood.
Discussing the personal histories that pulled her to the research captured in Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teends caught in the Crossroads of Migration, Dr. Lilia Soto, reflected on the hefty tolls of transnational girlhood: “My cost was emotional and psychological trauma as a result of growing up in this kind of family.”
Currently and associate professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University, Dr. Soto’s research exhumes the continuing patterns of struggle for families living at the “crossroads of migration”--as described in the subtitle of her book.
In this second part of our interview, Dr. Soto offers a glimpse at her future work, continuing to excavate the lives and trajectories of Latinx girls and women in and around the Napa Valley.
ANTERO GARCIA: So many of the experiences of the girls in your book were predicated on labor conditions of their fathers. Do you have a sense of how girlhood is shaped by labor conditions in the United States?
LILIA SOTO: I'm thinking about one girl in particular who thought that by coming to the United States, her family was going to be reunited. But the fact that everybody was working, she was still alone. It's sort of like there's a loss when they cross the border and then once they arrive, there's a lot of losses in terms of they either have to continue to babysit or they're home alone because everybody around them is working and they're not allowed to go out.
The only time that they have that’s more social is school, and school is tricky because they don't speak the language. What's coming to my mind is a continuous shift in terms of what they imagined the United States to be versus what they encounter once they arrive. There's a young woman who I remember said something like, "This is worse than Mexico," or, "Our house here is worse." I think those are also losses.
AG: Taking up the name of our publication, La Cuenta, I’m curious if you see these kinds of lost forms of girlhood or reconfigured family relationships as kinds of “costs” of transnational life?
LS: I don't want to advocate that we should all grow up in traditional, heteronormative, patriarchal families. I don't want to do that! Let's normalize different kinds of families because there's different chosen families. So let's normalize transnational families so that girls who grew up in these kinds of families don't feel like they were the oddballs or whatever.
For me, there's also a very emotional component. I don't talk about this in the book - I'm getting a little personal. It's hard for me to imagine who would I have become if my father had been around? How would I have felt in terms of relationships with men, whether as companions or as friends. What would my life had been? Would I have dealt with that trauma? And of course, I completely understand that my trauma is a little different because I didn't need to cross the border. I had the privilege of crossing the border legally, but I think I would've put it on a bill. My cost was emotional and psychological trauma as a result of growing up in this kind of family.
It's hard for me to imagine who would I have become if my father had been around? How would I have felt in terms of relationships with men, whether as companions or as friends. What would my life had been?
AG: That makes sense.
LS: I think there's something to say about growing up in a really conservative Catholic town, which is where I grew up. The house in Mexico where I grew up, the nuns lived across the street. So it's sort of like we got the nuns and we got the cross. There's something very violent I think about that too, that I'm not sure is my dad's fault in some ways, or that that has to do with the fact that I grew up in a transnational family, but also the geography of where the home was, where Catholicism was all around. And as a young woman in her 30's, my mother was raising six little girls on her own in a small conservative, heteronormative, patriarchal town, with violence of different kinds. So, I think those are some of the things that I think about in terms of some of the costs of growing up in a heteronormative family.
It's hard for me. I'm 47. I'm not longing for some things that didn't happen. I'm trying to understand myself as I am. But I think those are some of the things that I've thought about in terms of when I was interviewing the girls and then in terms of the kinds of upbringings that they had.
AG: In the years since your book came out, have you been able to share your work with any of your participants
LS: Regretfully, I did not keep in touch with them and it's my fault.
I did hear about some of them. I talk about three sisters and these three sisters, one of them ended up marrying a US citizen. She was a nurse in Mexico. She ended up marrying a US citizen, so she now lives in San Jose. My mom told me that she went to knock on her door, and my mom has a copy of my book and let the mother borrow the book and she could see herself in the story, and she was happy. She reached out a few times, and I responded when she first arrived to San Jose; she's married and has a boy, but she needed to wait in Michoacán so that her husband could get her the visa for her to come into the United States. Her two sisters are still down in Mexico. The youngest one became a teacher, and the one in the middle dropped out of college and she does makeup. The younger one married a teacher in Michoacán. So my sense is that because she is married to a non-US person, she's going to stay in Michoacán. The woman in the middle is still dating somebody who comes and goes. But what I think about their story, one of the sisters is already living in the United States, so that family's fractured, right, already?
AG: The cycle continues.
LS: Yes, and the cycle continues. So that's one of the stories that I'm familiar with. There was another young woman that I interviewed who didn't get into medical school, she ended up becoming pregnant. She was a single mom with a lot of health issues, like a very difficult pregnancy, but still trying to continue to work as a nurse in Michoacán. Those are some of the ones that I remember.
I feel like this project opened up my immigrant wound that I thought I had dealt with. And I just remember, I think it was in 2018, when the book had just come out, this radio station from Houston wanted to interview me about the book, and they asked me something personal and my voice cracked, and I was like, “I can't cry on the radio!” But I think it also made me feel like, whoa, this is something that hasn't gone away for me. And I think I told myself that I wasn't ready to write anything else that was, festering. It is an ugly word, when the wound festers. I didn't want to write about something that was still hurting, I guess, because I've got to protect myself too.
I didn't want to write about something that was still hurting, I guess, because I've got to protect myself too.
AG: In some ways, it's good that you still feel it. it's a reminder of your “why.”
LS: Yeah, why it's important.
AG: Where has this work taken you? What are you working on now?
LS: When I was writing about the Napa context for the last chapters of the book, I encountered the history of Carolina Bale. She was married to Charles Krug, the famous guy who's canonized as the one who made wine for consumption and production in the Napa Valley. And there's other figures in Sonoma and other parts. And he was a Prussian immigrant. He was 85, she was 20 when they got married, and he became who he is in history because of her, and she's nowhere to be found. When I read her story, I was like, oh my God! I got really angry. So she's been tapping me for 10 years, maybe longer. “Write about me, write about me!”
I went to the St. Helena Public Library seeing if they had any documents on Catalina Bale. And this woman was working on some collection and she was part of the St. Helena Historical Society, and she photocopied all the files and gave them to me, right?
She said, “The only thing that I ask you ...”. And I said, “Yes, of course I'm going to cite you and I'm going to thank you!” And then she said, “No, I want you to come and share your work once it's ready.” I haven't been ready to write it. Covid got in the way. So the book was published in 2018.
And I’m getting ready. I need to rethink how I want to pitch it, but it’s sort of the unsilenced histories of the Napa Valley. Carolina Bale is one of them, and I want to center her as the person who should be canonized as the one who made possible the wine industry in the Napa Valley. I also want to write a chapter on Amelia Ceja, who's the CEO of Ceja Vineyard. She's a good friend of mine, and her story is fascinating. She came to the US when she was 12. She was put in special ed classes because this was in the 1960s, and she's a Gemini like I am, but we're very different Geminis. The glass is always full. She's full of life. And she became the first woman CEO of Mexican-American wineries, as we know.
And then a third chapter is on Vanessa Arboleda, who's also a dear friend of mine who's the one who made the Arboleda Winery be what it is today. Ended up leaving her family's business. She just released her own wine. I saw her recently, I was like, “Oh my God, I want to be your biographer!”
AG: Love it.
LS: There are four planned chapters. The last chapter I want it to be about this organization in Santa Rosa called North Bay Jobs with Justice. They did a big boycott in Healdsburg at Simi Winery in November of 2021.
There's two women in particular that I would like to write about as well as the story of Simi Winery, which is really, really fascinating. But that would force me to move from the Napa Valley to Sonoma Valley. So I am still trying to think about cartographies and how do we map the valleys, the limits of a particular city. The families of both Amelia and Vanessa have land in Sonoma even though they live in Napa. So it feels a little bit different in terms of moving beyond girlhood to writing about these particular Latinx women, related somehow or having to do with the wine industry in different ways. That's the new project.
Propina
We are grateful, again, for Dr. Soto’s time with us. If you are interested in reading more of her work, please check out her book!
Next week is the 4th annual UndocuProfessionals Conference. We are excited to meet those of you attending during this conference.
We—Alix and Antero—will be facilitating a virtual workshop on professional writing. We hope to see some of you in our session. If you want to revisit our conversation with UndocuProfessionals’ founder, Sharet Garcia, take a look here:
Supporting UndocuProfessionals through mentorship and networking with Sharet Garcia
We’ll see you next week!