By Peter Elikann
The Daily Record Newswire
BOSTON, MA — When one picks up a novel by an attorney, it is usually clear by the first page that it is part of the genre called legal fiction popularized during the past quarter-century by the likes of John Grisham and Scott Turow. Legal novels, more often than not, are about murders or criminal trials or mysteries and feature protagonists who are prosecutors, defense counsel or detectives.
That is what strikingly sets apart Iris Gomez’s book, “Try to Remember.” Gomez, an attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute and a nationally recognized expert on immigration law, is the rare lawyer who has written a work of literary fiction rather than an obvious legal thriller.
It is a sensitive coming-of-age novel about Gabriela De la Paz, a 15-year old immigrant from Cartagena, Columbia, who arrives in Miami with her parents and two brothers, and the adjustments she must make bridging the cultural gulf between the old world of her parents and that of America of the early 1970s.
Remarkably, Gomez cleverly weaves a legal angle that hovers over Gabriela’s life like a penumbra and weighs heavily on it, yet is barely perceptible. It is the ongoing fear of deportation.
It is almost as if Gomez, as a prose stylist, has discovered a new genre of fiction — the stealth legal novel.
While the plucky and resourceful Gabriela’s travails with her own difficult family, school, poverty, family mental illness and teen dating customs comprise the heart of the book, the terror of the catastrophic legal consequences sidles up without warning again and again. It makes the legal tale richer and deeper because it is incorporated into a larger story of the human condition.
Although Gabriela’s green-card-bearing family is in the country legally, it is understood that such a status can be ephemeral.
At the story’s outset, Gabriela’s once solid father, Roberto, is beginning to show signs of an incipient mental illness. It is a source of shame that her mother handles by going into denial about it while, at the same time, trying to secretly cover it up from the eyes of the community.
Roberto has a menial job sweeping up at a tailor shop. When the daughter of a customer tries on a skirt that, by its short length, offends his traditionalist South American values,
“Roberto came out raging like a maniac and attacked that poor customer as if she’d sold her daughter into prostitution. Desgraciada! Inmorales!”
The ensuing criminal complaint is resolved with a deferred disposition that means the charge will go away without any adverse immigration consequences if he stays out of trouble for a year. However, if Roberto picks up any new criminal charges, his green card could be rescinded and he could be deported.
Gabriela, known as Gabi, understands that her loyal traditional family would then be obligated to follow him back to the old country. Her father’s increasingly erratic and sometimes violent behavior makes Gabi feel as though their stay in Florida rests on a knife edge from which, at any time, they could all slip off.
However, the deportation threat, as it would in real life, is not the mainstay of the family’s everyday existence and only casts a shadow. Gabi has more immediate problems. Known by her nickname Auxiliadora (The Helper), she is the main link between her immigrant parents and the outside world as she helps to translate the language and try to explain American mores to them.
There is a great deal of deception as she tries to hide the boy/girl mating rituals that her parents would find far too risqué. When she wins a coveted trip for top students to Egypt, she puts off telling her parents for months, knowing they would consider it unthinkable that a young woman could travel and stay in hotels without her family even though it would be properly chaperoned by the school.
With her father’s budding schizophrenia rendering him unemployable, Gabi’s mother, Evangelina, must sneak off and hide her cleaning and sewing jobs since Roberto would forbid any woman under his roof to work. It is a life of secrets.
More so than her brothers, Gabi increasingly is forced to take time away from her school work and social activities to run errands for her parents and humor her father’s irrational demands. He spends his days dictating absurd illogical letters to the government asking for millions of dollars to which he believes he is entitled. He writes corporations disjointed convoluted letters applying for skilled jobs for which he has no background. Gabi is forced to spend hours in the sweltering heat typing these letters for him.
Her protests to her mother complaining about the absurd, pointless waste of time are met without sympathy. Evangelina insists her daughter must adhere to the cultural belief that the child must honor a father, always. Evangelina also keeps insisting that her husband’s blossoming mental illness and violence is only a passing phase that they should just ignore until it goes away.
Although it may be a loving family, the increasing wearying assignments and fool’s errands heaped on Gabi can almost be seen as a form of abuse. Since her parents’ traditional views would bar her, as a female, from either a career or college, the only way out from the prison of her home life would be marriage some time off in the future.
More and more, Gabi becomes the parent to the parents. After all, isn’t that an all too common occurrence of the immigrant experience? The children are often more fluent in the English language and also acclimate more quickly to the contemporary American culture.
Gomez, herself a Columbian national whose family moved to the Miami area in her formative years, writes of the rituals of migration in a lyrical, almost poetic voice. It is a must read for any immigration lawyer who wishes to go beyond the legal technicalities of their practice to better understand the mindset of clients in their adopted land. It is a particularly timely topic for the United States of 2010.
The work’s heroine, Gabriela, must deal with so much more than cultural adjustments under the looming shadow of deportation.
“I couldn’t shake a feeling of doom that we were living in purgatory, waiting for my father to commit the act that would start the cycle of criminal and deportation threats all over again,” she says. “I was so weary of worrying about what could happen.”
Yet Gomez has created in the universal character Gabriela De la Paz as resilient a dreamer as you’ll find in literature.
Peter Elikann is an author, CNN commentator and Boston-based criminal defense attorney.
