Social Sciences
![Jean Guerrero - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_jean_guerrero.jpg)
Crux: A Daughter's Quest for Her Border-Crossing Father
A daughter's quest to understand her charismatic and troubled father, an immigrant who crosses borders both real and illusory-between sanity and madness, science and spirituality, life and death-now with a new afterword
PEN America Literary Award Winner • "The kind of memoir that seems to redefine the genre."-Los Angeles Review of Books
From renowned journalist Jean Guerrero, here is the haunting story of a daughter's mission to save her father from his demons and to save herself from destruction. Marco Antonio was raised in Mexico, then migrated to California, where he met Jean's mother, Jeannette, a Puerto Rican woman just out of med school. Marco is a self-taught genius at building things-including mythologies about himself and the hidden forces that drive us. When he goes on the run, Jean follows and embarks on an investigative journey between cultures and languages, the earthly and the mystical, truth and fiction.
A distinctive memoir about the search for an elusive parent, Crux is both a riveting adventure story and a profoundly original exploration of the mysteries of our world, our most intimate relationships, and ourselves.
"[Guerrero] writes poetically about borders as a metaphor for the boundary of identity between father and daughter and the porous connective tissues that bind them."-The National Book Review
PEN America Literary Award Winner • "The kind of memoir that seems to redefine the genre."-Los Angeles Review of Books
From renowned journalist Jean Guerrero, here is the haunting story of a daughter's mission to save her father from his demons and to save herself from destruction. Marco Antonio was raised in Mexico, then migrated to California, where he met Jean's mother, Jeannette, a Puerto Rican woman just out of med school. Marco is a self-taught genius at building things-including mythologies about himself and the hidden forces that drive us. When he goes on the run, Jean follows and embarks on an investigative journey between cultures and languages, the earthly and the mystical, truth and fiction.
A distinctive memoir about the search for an elusive parent, Crux is both a riveting adventure story and a profoundly original exploration of the mysteries of our world, our most intimate relationships, and ourselves.
"[Guerrero] writes poetically about borders as a metaphor for the boundary of identity between father and daughter and the porous connective tissues that bind them."-The National Book Review
Editorial Reviews
"Luminous . . . heartfelt and mystically charged."-The Washington Post
"Expressive and affecting . . . deeply researched and tightly written . . . Crux, at its heart, is [Jean] Guerrero's love letter to her dad."-NPR
"The genius of Guerrero's exquisite creation lies beyond her lyrical descriptions, and visceral phrases (e.g., "I had to learn to keep my sympathy zipped inside my stomach"). What truly makes this book extraordinary is the careful layering and connections. . . . It's the kind of story you think about long after you've finished reading it, and the kind of memoir that seems to redefine the genre."-Los Angeles Review of Books
"Crux is everything I want in a memoir: prose that dazzles and cuts, insights hard-won and achingly named, and a plot that kept me up at night, breathlessly turning pages. Jean Guerrero has a poet's lyrical sense, a journalist's dogged devotion to truth, and a fast and far-reaching mind. This is a book preoccupied with chasing-that is one of its harrowing pleasures-but, like all great memoirs, it is ultimately a story about the great trouble and relief of being found."-Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
"Crux is a triumphant memoir driven by the search for home and a father's elusive love. The twists and unexpected turns across borders are enchanting. A poignant, lovely debut."-Alfredo Corchado, author of Midnight in Mexico
"Jean Guerrero has done excellent reporting from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Now she examines the more mysterious borders of family history and that unknown region of the heart. You will be moved by Crux-this book is powerful and true."-Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil's Highway
"From the very beginning, Crux draws the reader in-Guerrero's language is as poetic as the story is engrossing. The characters, though, shine brightest. She draws from record, history, myth, and rumor to create compelling portraits of a family navigating multiple border...
"Expressive and affecting . . . deeply researched and tightly written . . . Crux, at its heart, is [Jean] Guerrero's love letter to her dad."-NPR
"The genius of Guerrero's exquisite creation lies beyond her lyrical descriptions, and visceral phrases (e.g., "I had to learn to keep my sympathy zipped inside my stomach"). What truly makes this book extraordinary is the careful layering and connections. . . . It's the kind of story you think about long after you've finished reading it, and the kind of memoir that seems to redefine the genre."-Los Angeles Review of Books
"Crux is everything I want in a memoir: prose that dazzles and cuts, insights hard-won and achingly named, and a plot that kept me up at night, breathlessly turning pages. Jean Guerrero has a poet's lyrical sense, a journalist's dogged devotion to truth, and a fast and far-reaching mind. This is a book preoccupied with chasing-that is one of its harrowing pleasures-but, like all great memoirs, it is ultimately a story about the great trouble and relief of being found."-Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
"Crux is a triumphant memoir driven by the search for home and a father's elusive love. The twists and unexpected turns across borders are enchanting. A poignant, lovely debut."-Alfredo Corchado, author of Midnight in Mexico
"Jean Guerrero has done excellent reporting from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Now she examines the more mysterious borders of family history and that unknown region of the heart. You will be moved by Crux-this book is powerful and true."-Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil's Highway
"From the very beginning, Crux draws the reader in-Guerrero's language is as poetic as the story is engrossing. The characters, though, shine brightest. She draws from record, history, myth, and rumor to create compelling portraits of a family navigating multiple border...
Readers Top Reviews
knabstrupperfan
Wonderful book. The writing is precise and emotional, you forget there’s someone telling you this compelling story and get into the events, that’s how amazing the writing is. The story is based on real events and yet it all is so surprising.
Deborah Fronkokna
This is a memoir that is a page-turner. If you live in or near San Diego and recognize the neighborhoods and schools, that's a plus. The author is a respected and experienced journalist who you may have heard on KPBS. This is a memoir of her relationship with her dad. It includes his immigration from Mexico and his trips back and forth over the border. This took p!ace in the near past, which puts his family's experience in relationship to current immigration experiences over the border. The notion that fascinated me was how a man considered to be schizophrenic in the US was viewed as a shaman in his own country. Owing to this theme, time and space become fluid in the book. I found the author's approach to this issue intriguing. Her style of writing is peotic, which, in my limited experience, is rare in a memoir. Her style is perfect for the message she communicates. I am happy to have bought this book and recommend it to family and friends.
Harriet H. Carter
I have long admired KPBS Fronteras Reporter, Jean Guerrero, who recently won two Emmys for her local reporting on the border wall. Last summer I heard her read an excerpt from her soon-to-be-published memoir at a KPBS-sponsored panel discussion led by NPR's Michel Martin. Juxtaposed to her quiet speaking voice was an elegant poetic style that was powerfully raw and gripping. So I anxiously awaited the publication of this memoir, and the wait was well worth it. This book not only recounts her own experience growing up the relatively privileged product of two immigrant parents who couldn't be more different from each other, but it also provides a glimpse into the mind of a first-generation American living alongside a border that is very much in the news with almost daily obsessive tweets by you-know-who about "building the wall." After journalism school, she takes a job with The Wall Street Journal in Mexico City so she can explore the country and discover the bits and pieces of her father's genealogical heritage in an attempt to get to the bottom of and try to understand her fractured and hurtful relationship with this extremely creative but troubled man, who is branded as a schizophrenic here but as a shaman there. More important, this memoir becomes a metaphoric journey of the coming-of-age hero leaving the mundane world behind, going through trials and tribulations, conquering fear, and returning with a life-enhancing wisdom. As Joseph Campbell famously noted: "The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands---and the two are atoned." But if metaphysics and mysticism aren't your cup of tea, then I highly recommend this book anyway as a masterful and colorful description of Mexico, its history, its people, and its culture. After reading the Kindle edition, I went back to Amazon and ordered a hardcover copy, because this is truly a book for my permanent library that I will want to read over and over again in the years to come.
T.E.Harriet H. Ca
Jean Guerrero's memoir Crux straddles many lines -- the southern border between the United States and Mexico, memoir and reportage, sanity and mental illness, the political and the deeply personal, and a dazzling realism that is by turns worldly and magical. Crux tells Guerrero's story of growing up in southern California, the daughter of a doggedly determined physician and Guerrero's mentally ill father, the scion of a successful businesswoman. It is a powerful narrative from a talented emerging writer who is making an indelible mark in many realms -- journalism, narrative nonfiction, social commentary and culture. The book largely focuses on Guerrero's tortured relationship with her father -- a mystical figure plagued by deep paranoia who was capable of extraordinary kindness and generosity, but also terribly cruelty toward his young daughters. "I'm sorry, Papi," Guerrero writers. "I know how much you hate to be pursued. The past has swallowed me. All roads before me lead straight back to you." But it is much more than a story about a troubled father-daughter relationship. Crux is a multi-generational chronicle of a Mexican American family planted on both sides of the border. She glides with ease between her contemporary experiences as a journalist, the origin story of how her parents met at a gas station and courted, and the lush and sometimes violent stories of her forebears and their distant roots stretching back to rural Mexico. A reporter for KPBS in Los Angeles, Guerrero uses her substantial skills to doggedly chase down every lead about her family history. She even goes so far as to make inquires and file records requests with the federal government to determine if, perhaps, her father's paranoid delusions about mind control could be explained by some long-ago mind-control control experiment that used her father as a guinea pig. By turns lyrical and literal, this is no plodding procedural of dull reportage. Guerrero's graceful writing soars with notes that have echoes of Octavio Paz or Gabriel Gabriella Marquez, such as when she describes the backyard garden that her father builds and stocks with iguanas and cockatiels, and a trip she takes with her mother to buy lady bugs and praying mantis eggs for the garden. "Somehow, the bucket of ladybugs came open in the car. A mariquita tickled my shoulder. I saw one on my sister's cheek. They were everywhere: crawling, flying, floating. The car filled with them, like winged droplet of blood... We forgot the praying-mantis eggs inside the house. They hatched, crawling up and down our walls for many days. We found the critters in our cupboards, in our clothes, in our comforters: countless guardians in Christian pose." As a former classmate of Guerrero's, I waited with great anticipation for the publication of her work. I was not disappointed, and nor will you be.
Short Excerpt Teaser
The Summons
Interstate 5 slices north–south and serpentine along the West Coast of the United States, parallel to the Pacific Ocean for more than a thousand miles. In the south, it curves into one of the world's busiest border crossings-the San Ysidro Port of Entry, where San Diego and Tijuana touch. A green sign hangs over the highway: "Mexico Only."
In the summer of 1986, a young Puerto Rican physician drove on a southbound lane just north of the juncture. She sought an exit called Bonita Road. But there is no such exit on I-5, and never was. It exists on I-805, to the east. The woman who would become my mother had just arrived in San Diego, in quest of the American dream, and her suitcase-stuffed rental vehicle was on a straight course to Mexico.
*
Jeannette Del Valle grew up on the western tip of Puerto Rico, suffering asthma her father blamed on the sugarcane pollen of their pueblo, Aguadilla. She had big, startled eyes that struggled to see-diagnosed with myopia at age twelve-and curly ash-blonde hair her mother did not let her cut, so that it grew long and thick to her thighs, a heavy cloak on her bony limbs. Her classmates called her Eskeleto, or Skeleton. From her earliest memories, her throat constricted against her will. She tried to pull oxygen into her convulsing lungs; she could not. Raised Catholic, she prayed to God for help. It came in the form of Doctor Mendoza, a chubby, gray-haired man who gave her shots of epinephrine and steroids, consoling her with a competent, bespectacled gaze. At night, she was alone in her battles against death. Her father purchased a nebulizer and an oxygen tank. Blind in the blackness, she sucked air into her esophagus. She survived each time to see the dawn.
Her father, Luis, was a bespectacled mechanic with a wide nose and brown skin. Despite his five-foot stature, Jeannette's father had a towering, storybook tale. He became a provider for his two younger siblings as a teenager, when his mother died of tuberculosis. His father, a police officer married to another woman, refused to recognize him as his son until later in life. Luis shined shoes in the street. He learned to build and install central air-conditioning units. On the hot island, his skills were in high demand. He helped establish El Colegio de Técnicos Refrigeración y Aire Acondicionado, to give the island's previously informal cool-temperature trades a licensing structure. He married Luz, a lean blonde with skin like carne de noni.
Jeannette was the third of their four children, the most delicate in complexion and size-the skinniest, the fairest, the most prone to sickness. A verdant tangle of plants and panapen trees separated their house from Playa Crash Boat, with its peach-colored sands and reaching blue waters. Jeannette's hardy siblings spent much of their time there, imitating the coqui frog's song, kicking coconuts, chasing crabs in the mud. Jeannette liked the ocean from an aesthetic point of view, but she preferred the indoors and its comfortable, controlled environments. Her favorite pastime was reading-medical literature, for the most part, which she checked out from the local library, dreaming of discovering a cure for the asthma that asphyxiated her almost every day. Naturally, her goal was to become a doctor. Even with all the doors and windows of their little Aguadilla house shut, Jeannette suffered. Even after the sugarcane harvests, when the fields were clean, the attacks came. One day, as she doodled unicorn intestines in an anatomy text, it occurred to her that maybe the sugarcane pollen was not the sole cause of her asthma. Posiblemente, she thought, it was also the creatures in the attic next door. Every evening she saw the bats emerging in droves. She wondered if spores from their dung or dander clung to the ubiquitous humidity and floated into her breathing space, irritating her lungs. When her family moved to a nearby house for unrelated reasons, her asthma attacks abated, and she remembered her hypothesis. She had a gift.
Luz nurtured it. It is humiliating to have to ask a man for everything-even underwear, her mother whispered in Spanish. In her adolescence, Luz had been known in her neighborhood as La Rubia Peligrosa-the dangerous blonde. The attention had planted vague dreams of grandeur in Luz's teenage mind: perhaps she would be a movie star someday, or a powerful curandera. Now she was a devoted wife and mother, linked forever to the whims, worries and wanderings of the man to whom she had committed. Luz did not know how to read, write or drive a car. She rarely left the house without her husband. She had been eclipsed by her man and feared the same fate for her daughters. She poured her passion into things she made for the family, food like s...
Interstate 5 slices north–south and serpentine along the West Coast of the United States, parallel to the Pacific Ocean for more than a thousand miles. In the south, it curves into one of the world's busiest border crossings-the San Ysidro Port of Entry, where San Diego and Tijuana touch. A green sign hangs over the highway: "Mexico Only."
In the summer of 1986, a young Puerto Rican physician drove on a southbound lane just north of the juncture. She sought an exit called Bonita Road. But there is no such exit on I-5, and never was. It exists on I-805, to the east. The woman who would become my mother had just arrived in San Diego, in quest of the American dream, and her suitcase-stuffed rental vehicle was on a straight course to Mexico.
*
Jeannette Del Valle grew up on the western tip of Puerto Rico, suffering asthma her father blamed on the sugarcane pollen of their pueblo, Aguadilla. She had big, startled eyes that struggled to see-diagnosed with myopia at age twelve-and curly ash-blonde hair her mother did not let her cut, so that it grew long and thick to her thighs, a heavy cloak on her bony limbs. Her classmates called her Eskeleto, or Skeleton. From her earliest memories, her throat constricted against her will. She tried to pull oxygen into her convulsing lungs; she could not. Raised Catholic, she prayed to God for help. It came in the form of Doctor Mendoza, a chubby, gray-haired man who gave her shots of epinephrine and steroids, consoling her with a competent, bespectacled gaze. At night, she was alone in her battles against death. Her father purchased a nebulizer and an oxygen tank. Blind in the blackness, she sucked air into her esophagus. She survived each time to see the dawn.
Her father, Luis, was a bespectacled mechanic with a wide nose and brown skin. Despite his five-foot stature, Jeannette's father had a towering, storybook tale. He became a provider for his two younger siblings as a teenager, when his mother died of tuberculosis. His father, a police officer married to another woman, refused to recognize him as his son until later in life. Luis shined shoes in the street. He learned to build and install central air-conditioning units. On the hot island, his skills were in high demand. He helped establish El Colegio de Técnicos Refrigeración y Aire Acondicionado, to give the island's previously informal cool-temperature trades a licensing structure. He married Luz, a lean blonde with skin like carne de noni.
Jeannette was the third of their four children, the most delicate in complexion and size-the skinniest, the fairest, the most prone to sickness. A verdant tangle of plants and panapen trees separated their house from Playa Crash Boat, with its peach-colored sands and reaching blue waters. Jeannette's hardy siblings spent much of their time there, imitating the coqui frog's song, kicking coconuts, chasing crabs in the mud. Jeannette liked the ocean from an aesthetic point of view, but she preferred the indoors and its comfortable, controlled environments. Her favorite pastime was reading-medical literature, for the most part, which she checked out from the local library, dreaming of discovering a cure for the asthma that asphyxiated her almost every day. Naturally, her goal was to become a doctor. Even with all the doors and windows of their little Aguadilla house shut, Jeannette suffered. Even after the sugarcane harvests, when the fields were clean, the attacks came. One day, as she doodled unicorn intestines in an anatomy text, it occurred to her that maybe the sugarcane pollen was not the sole cause of her asthma. Posiblemente, she thought, it was also the creatures in the attic next door. Every evening she saw the bats emerging in droves. She wondered if spores from their dung or dander clung to the ubiquitous humidity and floated into her breathing space, irritating her lungs. When her family moved to a nearby house for unrelated reasons, her asthma attacks abated, and she remembered her hypothesis. She had a gift.
Luz nurtured it. It is humiliating to have to ask a man for everything-even underwear, her mother whispered in Spanish. In her adolescence, Luz had been known in her neighborhood as La Rubia Peligrosa-the dangerous blonde. The attention had planted vague dreams of grandeur in Luz's teenage mind: perhaps she would be a movie star someday, or a powerful curandera. Now she was a devoted wife and mother, linked forever to the whims, worries and wanderings of the man to whom she had committed. Luz did not know how to read, write or drive a car. She rarely left the house without her husband. She had been eclipsed by her man and feared the same fate for her daughters. She poured her passion into things she made for the family, food like s...
