Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood

by Melissa Hart

Torn between the high socioeconomic status of her father and the bohemian lifestyle of her mother, Melissa Hart tells a compelling story of contradiction in this coming-of-age memoir. Set in 1970s Southern California, Gringa is the story of a young girl conflicted by two extremes. On the one hand there’s life with her mother, who leaves her father to begin a lesbian relationship, taking Hart and her two siblings along. Hart tells of her mom’s new life in a Hispanic neighborhood of Oxnard, California, and how these new surroundings begin to positively shape Hart herself. At the opposite extreme is her father’s white-bread well-to-do security, which is predictable and stable and boring. Hart is made all the more fraught with frustration when a judge rules that being raised by two women is “unnatural” and grants her father primary custody.

Hart weaves a powerful story of fleeting moments with her mother, of her unfolding adoration of Oxnard’s Latino culture, and of the ways in which she’s molded by the polarity of her parents’ worldviews. Hart is faced with opposing ideals, caught between what she is “supposed” to want and what she actually desires. Gringa offers a touching, reflective look at one girl’s struggle with the dichotomies of class, culture, and sexuality.

Genres: Memoir, Biography Memoir, Nonfiction, LGBT

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

I'm an Oregon-based author, journalist, and instructor for the MFA in Creative Writing program at Southern New Hampshire University. My essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Real Simple, Orion, High Country News, The Rumpus, Brevity, Woman's Day, The Advocate, Parents, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Hemispheres, and numerous other publications.

I'm the author of The Media Adventurer's Handbook: Decoding Persuasion in Everyday News, Ads, and More (World Citizen Comics, 2023), Daisy Woodworm Changes the World (Jolly Fish, 2022), Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens(Sasquatch, 2019), the award-winning middle-grade novel Avenging the Owl(Sky Pony, 2016), the memoir Wild Within: How Rescuing Owls Inspired a Family (Lyons, 2007), and the memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood(Seal, 2005).

I'm a contributing editor at The Writer Magazine, and I teach frequently at writing conferences, libraries, universities, and bookstores. I grew up near Los Angeles with my younger brother, who has Down syndrome. I live in Eugene with my husband and teen daughter, where I love to run and hike long-distance, cross country ski, kayak, cycle, cook, and roam the Pacific Northwest as an amateur naturalist.

Find me on Instagram and Twitter @WildMelissaHart.com, on TikTok @melissamhart , and at www.melissahart.com .

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is...weird. I can't tell if the author is ignorant of how offensively simplistic many of the themes in this book are treated (what is culture? what is cultural appropriation? how do class and privilege operate in a blended family? in different communities?), or if they are purposely framed within the context of innocence and the black-and-white ethics of children to make a point (perhaps the point that we all search for belonging - but that shallow attempts at cultural infiltration generally aren't a super effective way to find it?). The part that makes me believe it is the former if that no greater context or analysis is provided, even toward the end - leaving the reader feeling like perhaps the author lacks self-awareness.

The narrative seems to go something like this:

- White people have no culture, I'm going to try to pass myself off as Mexican
- I am excluded from Mexican cultural activities because I lack any authentic claim to this identity
- I'm going to date someone with a Latino identity so that I can try to lay some claim to it
- Oops I don't like the gender roles associated with the family with this identity, but will refuse to recognize my priviliege and ability to cherry pick the parts of a culture that I like or dislike
- White people have no culture, I'm going to try to pass myself off as Spanish
- Whelp, that didn't work out so good. Oh well, this life isn't perfect but it's mine I guess.

(There! Now you don't have to spend your precious time reading the full text!)

Some of the more interesting thematic pieces I felt were really underdeveloped in this memoir - growing up raised by a somewhat violent father (given custody because your mother is a lesbian) in the 70s-80s...that sounds like an interesting historical context piece worthy of a memoir. Realizing that cultural appropriation should not be a way of life, and reflecting on some truly messed up behaviour, and then passing on those lessons learned to your kids...that sounds like an interesting historical context piece worthy of a memoir. Perhaps reading the memoirs of members of the Latino community in Oxnard (those who aren't privileged enough to have a high degree of post-secondary education and to work in a highly competitive field like journalism and who aren't trained creative writers who had the cash to waste years of tuition money half-finishing courses and programs)...those sound like memoirs I'd like to read.

But this story, as is, I found pretty boring and lacking some of the critical analysis you would expect in a piece with themes like this.

[Noah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm reading this book as part of an LGBT-related book group, so I came to it with the assumption that it would be mostly LGBT-related content. In that sense, I was a little disappointed, but that isn't really the author's fault.

While I appreciate that her lesbian mother is more of a backdrop to the story (in that I like to see LGBT people and allies with more to talk about than just being LGBT), the constant romanticizing of Latino and other cultures with "color" really turned me off.

The book touches on issues of identity, and is well-written, but overall, it just chronicles a middle-class white girl's desperate attempt at latching onto someone else's culture in order to find an identity of her own. The part where she asks her mother for help making cookies for school, and shuns her mom's tried-and-true recipes in order to make a sub-par batch of the more "ethnic" Mexican wedding cookies pretty much sums up the whole book for me.

There is no critique of this from an older and wiser Hart, and there is barely any real examination of the class and race issues that are at play. Latino characters as often portrayed as being hurtful and exclusionary, rather than examining the complex dynamics that are at work in her relationships with Latino friends and lovers.

By the last few chapters, I found it really hard to be sympathetic, as she seemed completely unaware of her own race and class privilege in her desperate bids for "authenticity," without really examining her motivations or the weird American obsession with it beyond "Americans don't have any culture," which I think is kind of short-sighted, especially considering her interesting relatives.

The chapters about her life with Tony seemed to be pointing at some kind of revelation, but if happened, she never openly talks about it, instead choosing to whine about being excluded from Latino culture. I really hoped something would come up as a result of her trip to Spain, but it was glossed over and never examined further.

[Carolina Ruz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m not sure if this book should be called “An apology to cultural appropriation” or “White tears”. As a Latina I can’t begin to tell how many times I sighed and literally yelled at this book. You can’t say you have an “unfortunate ethnicity” when you’re white, you just can’t.

[Dawn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started reading this book because I wanted to know the story about the girl riding the bike on the cover.

The author never gave me that.

I wanted to know at what point the author heard the word “Gringa” and wether she heard it as a slur or a joke or whether she began to identify herself that way.

The writer never talks about that.

Reading this book, I noticed how the author writes about periods of her life and then just starts the next chapter without telling me how that period ends. Did she reflect on her friends statement who said “I don’t know who you are”? Did they talk about it or fight and have a falling out? Did she become furious and frustrated and storm out saying, “I never want to talk to you again!”

Did her dad continue to show an abusive side towards his wife? Did her stepmom and their relationship last or grow?

With her boyfriend, she made me read through two years of insufferably putting up with her boyfriend’s dad without ever speaking up for herself. And she made me go through the entire story of their relationship just to start a new chapter in Spain with her mom. Where was the breakup? How did she come to see she needed to leave? What did she take with her? What were their parting words to each other? Ugh.


I feel robbed of my time and investment into this book.

[Yasmin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A review of this originally appeared in Windy City Times,; a link can be found below.

Memoirs about growing up and feeling out of place are usually about people struggling to become part of the dominant culture. Inevitably, these are also tales about food, and much of the drama comes from the olfactory and textural differences between cuisines. Linda Furiya's Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America is one example, as is Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen, an account of growing up Vietnamese in Michigan. The emphasis on food as a central trope in immigration is not unusual given that the "melting pot" is part of the mythology of the United States.

Melissa Hart's Gringa: A Contradictory Childhoodalso centers on food as a way to enter into a culture, but her memoir is unusual in that it involves a young and very white girl who is transplanted from a Los Angeles suburb into the predominantly Mexican-American farming community of Oxnard. Hart's whiteness is not only marked by the paleness of her skin, frequently commented upon by her Mexican-American friends, but by the "American" food and rituals with which she grew up. During Hart's third grade, her adventurous mother had grown weary of the confines of suburbia, and the two became partners in crime as they learned Spanish together, aspiring to a life outside their borders: "My mother and I pretended allegiance to their Tupperware parties, to their Brownie troops, to their Sunday morning services at the Presbyterian Church."

It turned out that there was more than the love of a language involved in this endeavour, as Hart's mother eventually decamped with Patricia Sanchez, the school bus driver. But this was the late 1970s, and lesbian mothers, seen as immoral and damaging influences, were not likely to get custody. According to her Web site, Hart's custody story is part of the 2006 documentary, Mom's Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers' Custody Movement. But Gringa is less about the custody battle and more about Hart's own coming to terms with her whiteness and her sexuality, and her account of that makes for a gently engrossing tale that carefully unwraps the multitude of contradictions in which she finds herself.

As Hart grows up, she wants nothing more than to be like her friends in Oxnard, and she also wants nothing more than to be just like her beloved lesbian mother. Hart fails miserably at both. No matter how hard she tries, she is always literally the one white spot. She manages to secure an invitation to the quinceañera of a friend of her friend Rose, and finds herself relegated to the role of photographer instead of dancing with wild abandon as she had hoped. When the photos are finally developed, she sees herself as the outsider she is fated to be: " If you looked closely, you could see it poorly placed in the second row to the left … a white blob going nowhere."

Hart's attempts to fit into Mexican-American culture could be seen as problematic, and they are. What saves this book from becoming a cringe-inducing and fetishistic account of a white girl trying to appropriate "foreign" culture is the fact that Hart is unafraid to make it clear that she was, more often than not, making an ass of herself and, worse, that her attempts to assimilate were often insulting. Having acquired a Mexican boyfriend, Tony, she shows up at his family holiday party dressed as a Christmas tree, complete with brown paint on her face, hoping to raise some levity. She listens uncomfortably as someone tells her, "The family thinks you're making fun of their party."

At a dinner party for her father's boss, she meets the sophisticated 14-year-old Natalia, who has the added allure of an elegant Spanish mother, and the grade-school age Hart instantly resolves that this will be her girlfriend. Natalia's main interest in Hart is to inveigle her into sneaking the crème de menthe from her father's liquor cabinet, and Hart is anxious with hope: "Would the touch of Natalia's hands seduce me…? I tried unsuccessfully to break into goose bumps." Eventually, by the end of the evening, left cold without desire, she reluctantly reconciles herself to the fact that she is no lesbian.

Gringa takes us through Hart's adolescence and her college years, ending with a long-awaited short trip to Spain with her mother. Determined to be "authentic," Hart tucks Rick Steve's Europe through the Back Door into her backpack so that they might "avoid tourist traps and experience the real country and its people." When they arrive, every tourist in Spain can be seen walking around with in the book. Eventually, the two women give up on Hart's plan of authenticity and, following her mother's meanderings, actually enjoy the trip. At the end, Hart contemplates her attempt to become a "citizen of the world," her dictatorial tendencies on the trip and a bust of Franco, to which she whispers, "Dude, you need to lighten up."

©Yasmin Nair

http://www.wctimes.com/gay/lesbian/ne...

[Ariel Uppstrom · Rating 2 out of 5]

My group, the Pink TIGers decided to read different LGBTQ books for each meeting. This is our first one.

I was a little let down with this book. I thought it'd be an interesting perspective on the gay community, but it left me wanting more. The overall perspective is that of a girl growing up with parents who were divorced because her mother decided to live as a lesbian. It moves beyond her childhood to adulthood and her accepting her role in the world.

One aspect of the memoir that I found interesting was when she struggled with the fact that she knew she was straight but didn't want to disappoint her lesbian mother. Her attempt to find the same sex attractive to be able to have that link with her mother was really interesting and something I had never thought about.

I also enjoyed the idea that she could write about her gay mother and make it seem as if it were just in the background and not a momentous component of her life. She was able to make it seem as if it simply was and therefore could be written about as simply another occurrence in her life. Though I respect this skill and admire it, I still feel as if her experience of having a gay mother is one that needs to be highlighted more. There were moments in the story in which she didn't tell people about her mother because she feared they wouldn't understand, and I think this needed to be discussed more.

Throughout the memoir, she wrote about her struggle to be included in communities of color (primarily Hispanic) and how she consistently stuck out as a white girl. While I can understand her desire to be included in a culture she was interested in, I began to feel as if she had a more romantic view of the culture and people rather than seeing them as people. She tended to idolize any member of the group and tried to assimilate rather than respect and learn from the culture without making it a spectacle.

Overall, I felt the story fell flat. It simply didn't delve deep into more important concepts and it was without the author's realization of herself.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books sometimes find us.

Gringa was on a stack of unread novels and biographies, most of them brought with me when I left Huntington Beach for Portland. Melissa Hart's memoir was purchased in Oregon during the Willamette Writers Conference, following a class taught by its author. I loved Ms. Hart's YA memoir class. It was one of two that stayed with me weeks, even months afterward. She was funny, interesting and occasionally profound. Best of all, she didn't stand in front and lecture but offered opportunities for everyone to participate. In this internet age, she even had handouts -- greatly appreciated by those of us who are tactile and learn best from paper.

Her memoir is like its author: amusing, insightful and even kind. She may be distressed, however, to realize the slice of life I responded to was the one she tried to flee. I spent my late childhood and adolescence in the frozen tundra of Vermont. Gray February afternoons were leavened by dreams of escaping to the SoCal fantasies spun by Hollywood. I dreamed of beaches and suntans, surfer girls and Sunset Boulevard cocaine. Mexican cuisine and the Spanish language never entered that equation.

And then this book found me. For I didn't crack the first page of the book while I was in Oregon, but it accompanied me on my journey south. Now I am in LA, still pursuing those childhood dreams. Gringa provides a roadmap, a guide to coming of age in late 20th century Los Angeles. It also offers a few helpful recipes for those of us who must endure our lack of colorful background or distinct culture. It provides encouragement to those of us who envy groups who seem to have distinct culture and tight knit family. Then again, in 21st century LA, the tiny blonde and the middle aged white guy are increasing rarities everywhere except onscreen.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book begins with the dissolution of Hart’s parents’ marriage. The author’s mother leaves her husband for a woman. Consequently, the judge in the divorce proceedings rules that Melissa, her sister, and younger brother with Down syndrome should not be raised by two women and awards custody to Melissa’s father, her mother receiving visitation every other weekend.

Hart’s upbringing during the ‘70s bouncing between her two parents’ homes is a well-worn story at this point. The fact that her mother was a lesbian made Hart’s story slightly different than if she had been heterosexual, but for me, didn’t really affect the family members’ emotionally overall much differently than any other family breakup. The book offers atypical stories of Hart’s self-discovery and rebellious teenage experiences with the only unique aspect being the mother’s lesbian lifestyle.

Having lived in Southern California for most of my life, I was familiar with the locations. However, readers who are unfamiliar with places like Oxnard and Hawthorne California may not appreciate the juxtaposition of the locales.

The one novel feature in the writing was the “recipes” at the end of each chapter. I found those little summations quite appealing. The book was not horrible but I found the writing and content to be pretty banal. Probably closer to 2-1/2 stars.

[Ml · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gringa is a memoir rich with sensory detail that takes the reader into the author's very private life from the time she was young until she finished college and set out on her own. Her love of the Mexican/Spanish culture and desire to be part of it drives the story line. With each chapter she includes ‘dressed up’ recipes for Mexican dishes. Anyone interested in the struggle of children shuffled between divorced parents, children of gay/lesbian partners, Mexican/Spanish culture, and/or the difficulty of choosing and following a path in life will find the book a worthwhile and interesting read.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every so often, I read a book that brings me so into the story that I forget I'm reading and the characters come alive. This book deftly brings them to life for me, and the words just melt into each other without bumps or stops or rereading sentences. Overall a very whimsical, well-crafted story about a girl and her life, with which we can relate, not so much in her particular circumstances, but in her feelings as a child confronted by an adult world.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

This coming of age memoir didn't live up to my expectations. The play by play chapters didn't possess enough emotional depth, instead chronicling the little day to day dramas of a girl shuttling between divorced parents. I'd have preferred a look back at her childhood through the lens of her wiser adult self over this simple re-telling.

[Erika Dreifus]

Melissa Hart is a fellow contributing editor at The Writer magazine, and I jumped at the chance to read her memoir and ask her some questions about it. Our interview appeared initially in my newsletter, and I've reposted it here. (review copy from Seal)

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm giving this book a 4 because I couldn't put it down. I guess I couldn't put it down because it's similar to my own background, so I could easily relate. I also found the authenticity to be over the top. I hope to write this way. So that it's clear I'm telling the truth. She's not afraid to say things that she's embarassed about now. I tend to hide that when I write about myself.

[Linda Atwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the vivid images that Melissa painted throughout the book. I was intrigued to learn what it was like growing up in a family such as hers. Recently, I heard the author speak at a Willamette Writers event and couldn't wait to read the story and am glad I did.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. At times it's laugh-out-loud funny; other times, heartbreaking. A surprise bonus--a crazy, wacky recipe at the end of each chapter. I was impressed with the way the author structured the book.

[Delia · Rating 3 out of 5]

As always I wish I could add 1/2 stars. Ienjoyed reminiscing about 80s culture. The fact that the author and I went to school around the same time (to the same high school in fact) added to the fun.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing memoir, well-written and poignant in its detail. A girl, who seemed to have no (or at least little) parental guidance, finds her way into adulthood, but not without perilous obstacles. Sometimes painful to read.

[Robin]

New memoir by Eugene author.

[James O. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm looking forward to reading this. It promises to be a very different kind of memoir than I'm used to.

[Mary · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry to the author, but in my opinion this book was mostly a waste of time.

[Victoria Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melissa Hart's second memoir – complete with recipes – is delightful and thought-provoking. She juxtaposes difficult – or sometimes, painful – memories with warm, vivid descriptions of her life.

[Karla · Rating 5 out of 5]

A coming of age memoir written by a professor of journalism from the University of Oregon. A well done look at her stuggle for identity and looking at class, culture and sexuality.

[Laurie Cybulski · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was an ok book. I liked the recipe format in the beginning, but it really grew tiresome and disjointed towards the end. I didn't read this for LGBTQ reasons, so I didn't have that issue with it.

[Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very entertaining, a quick and easy read.