White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing

by Jennifer De Leon

Overview

Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, "What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?" While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn't been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return—to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family's history, and begin to make her own way.

Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents' home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625345677
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	03/26/2021
Series:	Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	1,002,763
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

JENNIFER DE LEON is author of Don't Ask Me Where I'm From and editor of Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education. De Leon has published prose in over a dozen literary journals, including Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a GrubStreet instructor and board member. She is assistant professor of creative writing at Framingham State University and makes her home in the Boston area.

Table of Contents

Author's Note vii

Part I Before

Mappinc Yolanda 3

The White Ceilinc 17

Round Three 23

A Pink Dress 31

The White Space 35

Part II Guatemala

The First Day 51

Guatemala Notebooks: Little Black Notebook 63

The Mountain 65

Guatemala Notebooks: La Voz Popular 77

Los Monólocos De La Vacina 79

Guatemala Notebooks: Life in the Campo 89

Volcán Tajumulco 91

Cuatemala Notebooks: Child Workers 103

Lucky Woman 105

Guatemala Notebooks: Guatemalan History 107

A Map of the World 111

Part III After

Work 117

Happy New Year 137

Gyms 155

The Story of the Letter from My Father 179

Mother Tongue 183

Bridged 193

Acknowledgments 213

Editorial Reviews

01/18/2021

De Leon (Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From) explores her identity as a writer and a Guatemalan American in this affecting essay collection. The pieces are organized into three sections: the first, “Before,” sees De Leon push back against expectations, as in “The White Ceiling,” about taking birth control in a “mostly Catholic” culture. In the title essay, De Leon helps her father put his first résumé together and considers “what is in the white space outside the education, professional experience, skills categories, and how it is the richness of this white space that I want to explore.” Inspired, she moves to Guatemala to write and gain a better understanding of the culture that her parents left. Essays in part two capture her travels, such as “Volcán Tajumulco,” in which she hikes “the highest volcano in Central America,” and “Los Monólogos de la Vagina” which describes a performance in The Vagina Monologues. The final section, “After,” shines: the essay “Mother Tongue” explores the importance of sharing the Spanish language with her son, and “Bridged” poignantly describes the separation that education and opportunity can cause between generations. This empathetic, wide-ranging look at De Leon’s growth as a thinker is a journey worth checking out. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"The essays are engaging, funny, and thoughtful, written with an appealing ease and directness. Whether describing climbing a mountain in Guatemala, disobeying her father, or taking her first creative writing class, De Leon writes with honesty and warmth . . . Jennifer De Leon’s White Space is an entertaining, thought-provoking personal essay collection that explores race and writing with humor and wisdom."—Foreword Reviews

"De Leon explores her identity as a writer and a Guatemalan American in this affecting essay collection . . . This empathetic, wide-ranging look at De Leon's growth as a thinker is a journey worth checking out."—Publishers Weekly
 
“De Leon trains her gaze on the gaps in our conversations and conscious thoughts; she writes the invisible into existence, the awkward, even painful silences into language, and in that rendering, creates a new space where what was felt, but unacknowledged can be discussed.”—Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers

“Insightful and powerful, these essays keep us company as we ourselves face the unpredictable, straddling multiple realities.”—Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana: A Novel

“Jennifer De Leon represents the new generation and exciting voices of Latinx storytellers. White Space makes space for all of us: it’s the book we need to be reading now as we create a more united América, which includes north and south.”—Julia Alvarez, author of Afterlife

“White Space is the book I have been waiting for—a moving dispatch on family, country and creativity from a daughter of the Central American diaspora.”—Daisy Hernández, author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed

"White Space documents a life in flux, a life in the throes of becoming, and we applaud its subversive, metaphoric depth. We were both struck by Jennifer De Leon's lively writing and engaged consciousness. We see her as someone who might well join the ranks of our leading essayists, such as Roxane Gay, Samantha Irby, Michelle Orange; soon, we hope. She is well on her way."—Madeleine Blais and Kathy Roberts Forde, Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction judges

“Jennifer De Leon takes the register of fierce familial love built and held onto upon the harsh ground of dislocation like nobody else can. This is a collection not only for her ancestors and children but ours.”—Ru Freeman, author of A Disobedient Girl

“De Leon is a sharp observer and storyteller, and her essays are devastating, hopeful, inquisitive, honest. What a joy to read!”—Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls

From the Publisher