Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can't Forget

by Reyna Grande

An ambitious memoir in essays by beloved bestselling author Reyna Grande that illuminates the hidden cost of the American Dream and the complex journey of healing that follows survival.

Reyna Grande has spent her career powerfully capturing the raw reality of life across borders. Her memoirs laid bare the trauma of family separation and celebrated her journey to become a college graduate and a writer. Now, in Migrant Heart, she offers her most probing and intimate work yet, turning her gaze inward to expose the scars left by migration and the ongoing work of stitching herself back together.

Grande unflinchingly interrogates how living between two nations, two languages, and two identities has shaped the woman, mother, and writer she has become. In this collection, she confronts the deepest questions of the immigrant How do we bridge the two worlds we live in? What does it cost you to lose your language? How do we turn pain into power? And when traumatic memories threaten to define us, how can telling our story help us heal while honoring our boundaries?

Migrant Heart is a powerful testament to Grande’s role as a storyteller and cultural witness. It is an essential, moving read that continues to expand what we understand about the United States and the complex people who cross and live within its borders. It is a book for anyone seeking to understand the true price of belonging and the enduring power of finding one’s voice.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 12, 2026

About the author

Reyna Grande is the author of three novels, Across a Hundred Mountains, which received a 2007 American Book Award; Dancing with Butterflies, which received a 2010 International Latino Book Award, and A Ballad of Love and Glory, which was a Los Angeles Times Book Club selection in 2022. In her memoir, The Distance Between Us (Atria, 2012) Reyna recounts her experiences as a child left behind in Mexico when her parents emigrated to the U.S. in search of work, and her own journey to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant at the age of nine. Its sequel, A Dream Called Home, was published in 2018. Her latest book is Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings, an anthology by and about undocumented Americans.

Reviews

[Mayra de Aguiar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grande just does not miss. Her writing is so full of love, truth, beauty and melody. I would read anything she writes and I wish there were endless pages of her writing to last me until the end of my life. She opens the door for her readers to see her deepest spaces and, as I find myself in the same stage of life as her, it really touched me. I love this book.