In the Country We Love: My Family Divided

Even though I watch a ton of television shows and movies, I had no idea who Diane Guerrero was until I watched The Daily Show, and she was promoting her book, In the Country We Love: My Family Divided, which is also available in a version more suitable to younger readers, My Family Divided: One Girl’s Journey of Home, Loss, and Hope. It was the second book that I read in 2019, and I felt as if it was the most germane book to read as an American during the Presidon’t era.
Guerrero is an actor whose parents and older brother were undocumented immigrants from Colombia. They were individually deported when she was a child, and she had to figure out how to raise herself and survive. In the Country We Love: My Family Divided basically gives readers an idea of what daily life is like for a child who lives with the threat that she will be separated from her parents and what it is like after that threat becomes a reality.
In the Country We Love: My Family Divided shows how undocumented immigrants are prone to being exploited by unsavory people. Her parents tried to get naturalized, but the process is not easy or instinctual, and scam artists try to get rich off a situation that is rife for abuse because they know there will be no consequences when the undocumented person realizes that he or she was the victim.
Unsurprisingly the stress of living with the daily threat of separation and the actual separation plays a crucial role in destroying the family. In the Country We Love: My Family Divided does an excellent job conveying how simply keeping family members apart can demolish psychologically bonds even when the child intellectually understands that the parent loves her and did not intend for this to happen. It amazes me that people go to weddings, and it is such a part of popular culture to hear the words, “What God has joined together let no man put asunder,” yet they don’t blink when the government, a tool of man, does exactly that while saying in the same breath that the US is a Christian nation. It baffles the mind what is deemed Christian for the nation to enforce versus the individual to live. Single parents are constantly demonized, but our policies essentially create single to no parent situations while our system is simultaneously supposed to care about the best interest of the child.
Logistically we know that long distance relationships generally don’t work and to make them work, it costs money: to travel, to call, etc. In the Country We Love: My Family Divided describes the innate awkwardness of trying to imbue a simple phone call with more than it could handle and placing a burden on a child to assuage and comfort the parents that creates parentification, a form of (hopefully unintentional) abuse in which a dependent child has switched places by taking on the duties of the parents.
In the Country We Love: My Family Divided also shows the effects of deportation once the child becomes an adult. Guerrero is one of the lucky ones, but similar to children who were either raised by the state or a guardian, it is a legal fiction to pretend that at eighteen, a legal adult at eighteen has the same capabilities and needs less transition time than a legal adult who can still be legally considered a dependent child if he or she still benefits from having the support of at least one parent. She is one of the more fortunate ones, but it isn’t surprising that without a support system, she was soon in debt, floundering and while all work is good, it isn’t surprising that for young, beautiful women, the most lucrative careers require the skimpiest outfits. Without an artistic passion acting as her internal compass and getting therapy, she could have ended up in dire circumstances.
I read In the Country We Love: My Family Divided in a short period of time. I found it incredibly engrossing and fast paced, but I was not thrilled that the book used the how we got here trope in which it starts with an event that happens at the end or the middle of the story, then starts at the beginning. If you are a young actor, you may also find her story practically useful as she figures out how to get her big break and how she worked on improving her acting skills. Celebrity gossips will probably be disappointed because you can actually feel the shift when the book goes from being a mostly frank account of her life albeit with occasional rose-colored glasses when she examines aspects of her childhood to the usual uniform praise of the entire cast and crew of every set that she works on, and everything is just dandy and perfect. Comparatively it probably is, but practically she is also at the beginning of her career, not the end, so she does not need to shoot herself in the foot with any juicy details for a couple of extra bucks on a book. One could argue that considering the title of her book, she could have left that part out, but from a marketing angle, the only reason that many people will read or hear about the book is because she is famous.
A friend started to read In the Country We Love: My Family Divided after I recommended it because she too was interested in the subject matter, but she isn’t a completist and will dump a book if she does not like it. She never finished the book. Kids look at the world unquestioningly and think that their family is perfect so when she writes about her childhood generally, I can see someone finding it tedious, but it worked for me, and I was invested. I actually think that when she is older, if she revisited these periods in her life and decided to write a more thorough autobiography, it would benefit from a changed perspective that time can give because she is still young and a little close to all these past events to really wisely contribute to all the socioeconomic and intersectional issues that she experienced.
I highly recommend In the Country We Love: My Family Divided. Even if you don’t like it, it is a quick read and not a big time commitment. I did glance at My Family Divided: One Girl’s Journey of Home, Loss, and Hope, and it seemed identical, but I bet they cut out the bits about alcohol use.