February 2012 Conversations with Las Comadres: Teleconference Series
The Maid’s Daughter — Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
The Barbarian Nurseries, A Novel — Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Length: 00:55:27 | Size: 13.31 MB
February 2012 Book of the Month
The Maid’s Daughter, Living Inside and Outside the American Dream
By Mary Romero
Published by New York University Press
ISBN-13: 978-1594487484
The book explores this complex story about belonging, identity, and resistance, illustrating Olivia’s challenge to establish her sense of identity, and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in her life. Mary Romero points to the hidden costs of paid domestic labor that are transferred to the families of private household workers and nannies, and shows how everyday routines are important in maintaining and assuring that various forms of privilege are passed on from one generation to another. Through Olivia’s story, Romero shows how mythologies of meritocracy, the land of opportunity, and the American dream remain firmly in place while simultaneously erasing injustices and the struggles of the working poor.
About the Author: Mary Romero
The author is professor and faculty head of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is also a faculty affiliate of Women and Gender Studies, Asian Pacific American Studies, and African and African American Studies. She received the American Sociology American Section on Race and Ethnicity Minorities 2009 Founder’s Award. In 2004, she received the Society for the Study of Social Problems’ Lee Founders Award, the highest award made by the Society for the Study of Social Problems for a career of activist scholarship. Romero is a former Carnegie Scholar, Pew National Fellowship for Carnegie Scholars, Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
February 2012 Additional Conversation
The Barbarian Nurseries, A Novel
By Héctor Tobar
Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
ISBN-13: 978-1479814664
With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.
Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you’d never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn’t hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she’s never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . .
With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
About the Author: Héctor Tobar
Héctor Tobar, now a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.