Making an American Family : A Recipe in Five Generations

by Janet Rodriguez

Making an American Family: A Recipe in Five Generations, the progressive story of one family is told through five generations, beginning with their journey into the United States during the Mexican Revolution, and culminating with their posterity, attending school online during the COVID19 pandemic. A family memoir, told through a chorus of voices, invites the reader into the multi-sensorial experience of memory and story.

At first glance, Rodriguez’s family memoir is a unique culinary journey, chronicling the growth and development of one family through five generations, highlighted by the foods that sustained, encouraged, and held their families together. Upon closer examination, the family memoir is a picture of erasure and homogenization through generations, as illustrated by the faded pictures in the cover. Rodriguez is faithful to show how her immigrant family, like most families who came from Mexico in the early 20th century, were systematically stripped of their language, heritage, culture, and their given names, all for the price of “becoming American” in the USA. With passion and precision, Rodriguez serves the reader a family feast of memories, a microcosm of the American family.

300 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2022

About the author

Janet Rodriguez is an author, teacher, and editor living in Northern California. She is the author of the family memoir, Making an American Family: A Recipe in Five Generations (Prickly Pear Press, 2022). In the United States, her work has appeared in Hobart, Pangyrus, Eclectica, The Rumpus, Cloud Women’s Quarterly, American River Review, and Calaveras Station. She is the winner of the Bazanella Literary Award for Short Fiction and the Literary Insight for Work in Translation Award, both from CSUS Sacramento in 2017. Her short stories, essays, and poetry usually deal with themes involving morality in faith communities and the mixed-race experience in a culturally binary world. She holds an MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Editor of Interviews at The Rumpus. Follow her on Twitter @brazenprincess

Reviews

[Sharman Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging and personal, while also revealing so much of Mexican and American history and life, particularly of the experience of Mexican immigrants to California. These compelling family stories illumine the author’s central question, “What is happiness?” In answering that, she explores further—is her family happy? Is she? The warmth and love here, between parents and children, sister and sister, is central to the book, even though the author did not sentimentalize her family or shy away from some unpleasant truths. I felt I had been allowed a window into these people’s lives. I felt it was a privilege to read this, and I’m grateful to the author for all her research, dedication, and humanity.

[Diane Gottlieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Making an American Family: A Recipe in Five Generations is a gorgeous, sweeping, love letter of a memoir, an exploration of five generations, of culture and history, and of matriarchs who worked hard to keep the family together, even as their new home and pressure to assimilate worked to pull them apart.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful meditation on family and food and the terrible and beautiful dislocation of being an immigrant. In other words it's the story of America.