The perfect book for not so perfect daughters
Loss, homeland and mental health in young adult format.
I imagined Erika Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter would be a straight forward read about a Latina teenager’s struggles with her parents’ expectations. The book instead takes the reader through mysterious double lives, teenage love, and Mexican drug cartel violence.
Sanchez’s book focuses on Julia, a teenage girl living in Chicago with her Mexican immigrant parents. The family is overcome with grief over recently losing their older daughter in a car accident.
The agony of Julia’s mother and a perceived lack of emotion in her father compounds the difficult relationship between mother and remaining daughter.
In her parents’ eyes, her older sister Olga was a saint, the perfect Mexican daughter who wanted nothing more than to attend community college and live at home with her parents indefinitely, helping her mother with traditional cooking and massaging her father’s feet after a long day at the factory. Julia’s dreams are bigger.
While Julia’s relationship with her mom followed many of the patterns present between immigrant mothers and their first-generation American daughters, at times it felt contrived and forced. This could, however, be a side-effect of the YA genre.
Julia’s mother forces her to have a quinceanera despite being almost sixteen and laments Julia’s lack of interest in helping her with housework and traditional Mexican cooking. Meanwhile, Julia views her mom as boring and controlling, complaining at times about not having internet or having to attend church with her parents.
Julia’s lack of understanding of her mother’s sadness and frustrations confused me. Surely she would have some understanding of what her mother has gone through as an undocumented Mexican woman in the US.
Perhaps I am a bit too detached from teenage me, at 23 I’ve forgotten some of the fights I got into with my own immigrant single-mother. I do know that at least one involved Facebook, so maybe Julia and I aren’t so different!
Julia begins to learn that Olga may not have been the perfect Mexican daughter either. I wasn’t expecting the novel to contain a mystery, and the reader gets to uncover each new clue alongside Julia as she talks to Olga’s friends, and snoops around her sister’s life.
The story takes another unexpected turn when Julia gets a white boyfriend, another aspect of the book where the YA writing style felt heavy-handed.
Connor loves books and indie music and wants nothing more than to buy Julia artisanal coffee and have romantic, safe sex. I was reminded of books I read as a teen that featured perfectly curated boyfriends with shaggy brown hair, coy humour and an apparent lack of interest in sex. To me, Connor felt unrealistic and unnecessary, but, again, I am not part of the author’s intended audience. Perhaps he is indeed a teenage girl’s dream boyfriend.
Julia’s grief over the loss of Olga and despair with her home life comes to a head in the middle of the story. I was struck by how I had never heard of a story that focuses on mental illness in Latin American communities, let alone read a novel from the perspective of a mentally ill Latina teenager. While reading about depression and self-harm was, at times, difficult, I welcomed this unanticipated shift in the book.
In perfect immigrant parent fashion, Julia’s parents send her on a trip to Los Ojos, their hometown in Mexico. When Julia questions why she needs to be sent away, both her parents talk of the power of their home country, of being around extended family and returning to cultural traditions. Existing in Mexico seems to carry the same weight as several weeks of therapy, a familiar train of thought for me.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own mum’s view of her home country, Ireland, and how, when my mental health suffered, she enrolled me in a course of cognitive behavioural therapy in Dublin, where I lived with my granddad.
For Julia and I, our mother’s love for their home countries take on healing power. Existing in an immigrant parents’ home country around their extended families will always be seen to heal their first-generation children.
The direction of Sánchez’s novel was certainly not what I expected; it was something far better.
First and foremost, it was an engaging read that has a little something for every type of reader. The book serves as a resource for Latina teenagers who need to see someone like them reflected in the pages. My experience as a first-generation Irish immigrant is obviously very different from that facing the Latinx and undocumented communities, but I was able to see part of myself in Julia’s struggles. I can imagine many American teens would feel the same.
Sánchez also provides a comprehensive list of mental health resources for teens in the US, so that girls like Julia can also find healing. In this sense, it is more than just a novel, it could be a lifeline.
