Review by New York Times Review
TWO OPPOSED ARCHETYPES tend to dominate America's debate about undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump and his allies treat them as dangerous invaders. The president said in the 2015 speech announcing his campaign: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." Immigration advocates have countered by highlighting immigrants with unblemished records and exemplary achievements. The Dreamers - so called because they'd be eligible for legal residency under the Dream Act - have become the public face of the immigrant rights movement. These are people who were brought to the United States as children and who have, in most cases, successfully pursued education or military service, accomplishments widely seen as proving Dreamers worthy of a right to live in the only country they know. This year, Jin Park, a Harvard student and the first Dreamer to win a Rhodes scholarship, attended the State of the Union as the guest of a Democratic congresswoman. This emphasis on immigrant excellence makes political sense, but it leaves out those who have not been able to transcend their own desperate circumstances. "Emphasis on 'model immigrants' and the 'deserving poor' can help win important improvements for select groups, but it falls short for the vast majority of people - people with tougher, more complicated stories," Aaron Bobrow-Strain writes in his searing new book, "The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez." A rich, novelistic tale of a young woman whose life spans both sides of the United States-Mexican border, "The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez" is one of those tougher stories. As Bobrow-Strain depicts his titular heroine, she is ebullient and indomitable, a smart, fiercely loving survivor. She is also impetuous, often shortsighted and frequently derailed by her own compounding trauma. Aida's situation leaves her no margin for error, but she errs anyway. She's a radiantly optimistic character in a relentlessly bleak, unlucky world. By the halfway point of "The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez," Aida has suffered enough for several lifetimes. After being brought to the United States when she was in elementary school, she saw her mother, Luz, beaten by an American boyfriend who used Luz's immigration status against her. Though a bright, enthusiastic student, she got pregnant at 16 and married a man who repeated the cycle of abuse. She was deported without her son to Mexico, where, lacking the few dollars she'd need to obtain the documents for a national ID, she couldn't work legally. For want of a life-changing $20, she took a bartending job. At the end of her first night, exhausted and afraid to walk home in the dark, she accepted a ride home from a man who first tried to kiss her and then, when she resisted, stabbed her nearly to death. In a terrifying, chaotic scene, she was allowed back in the United States for emergency medical treatment. By the time she is reunited with her adored son, readers who've come to care about Aida may feel a brief moment of relief. So it's gutting when that chapter ends with the words: "And then the darkest part of her story began." Bobrow-Strain intertwines Aida's story with several others. There's her father, Raúl, a peasant revolutionary who taught himself yoga to survive a stint in a Mexico City prison. We learn about the life of Rosie Mendoza, a social worker who overcame her own history of horrific abuse and deprivation to help women like Aida. And we follow Ema Ponce, a gay Ecuadorean college student who, entrusting her fate to human smugglers, embarks on a hellish journey to America, where her life intersects with Aida's in a way that briefly holds out the promise of a happy ending. Unspooling these intertwined narratives, Bobrow-Strain, a professor of politics at Whitman College, asks us to put an unusual amount of trust in him as an author. In an endnote, he writes that his book "occupies a space between journalism and ethnography, with a dash of oral history and biography." I don't know much about the professional rules of ethnography, but some of Bobrow-Strain's methods are outside of normal journalistic practice. "Aida Hernandez" is a pseudonym, as are the names he gives most of his other central figures. Further, Aida is more than just Bobrow-Strain's subject. As he wrote the book, he gave her drafts to read, and he says that he plans to share a third of the book's proceeds with her. "It is a story told in collaboration with Aida about the brutal consequences of policies she was, in Audre Lorde's poetic language, 'never meant to survive,' " he writes. In crafting the narrative, he didn't rely just on her account - as he describes his process, he confirmed details through numerous other interviews, legal and medical records, photographs and contemporaneous news stories, among other sources. But Aida's memories, he writes, form the heart of the project. There's something admirable in Bobrow-Strain's approach. Janet Malcolm once wrote that the journalist "is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Bobrow-Strain seems determined to avoid the ethical pitfalls inherent in making other people's lives into literary material. In doing so, though, he requires readers to take a lot on faith. It's highly unusual for journalists to enter into profitsharing arrangements with their subjects. And if ethnography generally insists on anonymity, journalism frowns on it. "The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez" strikes me as entirely believable, but I imagine some will approach it skeptically. If the book rings true, it's because Aida is such a complex and imperfect figure; she is not whom you'd invent if you wanted to write a social justice parable. The greatest catastrophes in her life are to some extent self-inflicted. In one of the book's most harrowing turns, after surviving the stabbing and clawing herself out of the psychic collapse that followed it, she found herself in a Walmart with her mother. She'd been doing her best to be a good parent, volunteering in her son's classroom and attending his school events. But she was haunted by her inability to afford Christmas presents, and by the way her son pretended not to care: "He was too good at accepting disappointment for such a small boy." On impulse, she put a $6 Lego set into her purse. It landed her in Eloy, an immigration detention center where, according to Bobrow-Strain, more detainees have committed suicide than at any of America's 250 other immigration prisons. Separated from her son and facing permanent exile, she again fell into despair and again pulled herself out. She became a friend and leader to the other women, finding lightness and solidarity in the cruelest of places. When, in one of the book's most dramatic moments, she wins herself a reprieve that enables her to return to her family, I cried with happiness. Politically, I'm not quite sure where Aida's journey leaves us. Certainly, there are obvious lessons, particularly about how our broken immigration system creates unique dangers for women. Ultimately, though, Bobrow-Strain's tale is too full of singular contingencies to yield obvious prescriptions. "The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez" is an illuminating work of literature, not an ideological tract. The story of Aida's life doesn't have to prove a point to have value. If the book rings true, it's because Aida is such a complex and imperfect figure. Michelle GOLDBERG is a columnist for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
How does a smart, ebullient child with ties to two symbiotic towns, one in her native Mexico, the other in Arizona, end up as a PTSD-afflicted detainee in an American for-profit immigrant-detention facility? Bobrow-Strain, an academic and an immersion journalist of conscience in the mode of Alex Kotlowitz, tells the dramatic true tale of a woman he calls Aida Hernandez with extraordinary clarity and power, while also providing deep background on the forces behind the tragically unjust immigration laws and procedures she battled. Aida endured poverty, sexism, and violence on both sides of the border, while becoming fluent in English as an undocumented resident in the U.S., and aiming for college and a career. But when she became pregnant at 16, she was catapulted back into abuse and deprivation in Mexico and nearly died after a vicious attack. Rushed to a U.S. hospital, Aida slowly recovered physically, but her psychic wounds were deep and lasting as she was incarcerated as an illegal and separated from her young, traumatized son. Bobrow-Strain's searing chronicle of Aida's struggles to secure legal residency include the illuminating stories of her father, a 1960s revolutionary; social worker Rosie Mendoza; and Ema, a lesbian Ecuadoran immigrant. In this caring and unforgettable borderland saga, Bobrow-Strain reveals the profound personal toll of the immigration crisis.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this merger of "journalistic nonfiction and ethnography," politics professor Bobrow-Strain narrates the story of Aida Hernandez, who grew up an undocumented immigrant in Douglas, Ariz.; married and had a child with an American citizen; was deported in 2008 to Mexico at age 20; and, not long after, returned to the U.S. in an ambulance after she was stabbed and left for dead by a stranger. After the stabbing, Hernandez developed PTSD, exacerbated by fears she'd be deported and separated from her son again. Four years later, she was arrested for misdemeanor theft and spent 10 months in the Eloy Immigration Detention Center before getting a green card. Interwoven with Aida's story are those of her father, a former socialist revolutionary; Rosie Mendoza, a former undocumented immigrant who became Aida's social worker; and the twin border towns, Douglas and Agua Prieta, Mexico. Bobrow-Strain draws from dozens of interviews with the principal actors in the story, including four years of collaboration with Hernandez, providing him an insider's perspective that elevates the narrative above simple reportage. This is a riveting and distressing account of one woman's immigration nightmare, and a well-researched argument against the status quo in border security. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A professor combines his academic research with his decadeslong U.S.-Mexico border activism to brightly illuminate immigration realities by focusing on the struggles of one young woman.In this powerful saga, Bobrow-Strain (Politics/Whitman Coll.; White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, 2012, etc.), a founding member of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition in Washington state, focuses primarily on Agua Prieta, Mexico, just across the border from Douglas, Arizona. Until around 1990, the border between the two towns seemed mostly invisible. Douglas residents often shopped, dined, and worked in Agua Prieta, and vice versa. Aida Hernandeznot her actual name, an anonymity the author explains in detailwas born in Agua Prieta in 1987. Until age 9, she resided in Mexico, impoverished but generally content. When Aida's mother left Mexico with her and her siblings to escape a violent marriage, vast complications began. The new man in the family's life turned out to be worse than the biological father, but they were dependent on him for lodging and food and cowed by his threats to have them deported back to Mexico. Although Aida dedicated herself to performing well in school and learning fluent English, her undocumented status meant constant uncertainty. It also meant that she was vulnerable to violent male figures, ranging from her mother's paramour to Aida's boyfriends to abusive Border Patrol agents. When Aida had a son at age 16, her lack of adequate income and her overall vulnerability became far more complex since every decision she made would affect her child. Bobrow-Strain met Aida through a social worker whose own complicated border saga mingles with many others portrayed by the author in vivid and often agonizing detail. The settings eventually transcend Agua Prieta and Douglas to encompass immigration detention centers, overwhelmed immigration courts, and, eventually, New York City, where Aida and her son battle for a better life.This potent, important work, which "occupies a space between journalism and ethnography, with a dash of oral history and biography," adds much to the continuing immigration debate. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
