Interview In Lieu of A Review
In Reclaiming Me: Lessons from a First-Generation MexiCan Daughter, Adriana Martínez reclaims her past and offers lessons that we could all use about persistence, hope, and joy. These lessons resonate now at a time when Latinos are hunted in their own country. We need the voice of someone who grew up in the projects of the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, attended Stanford and UCLA business school to become a powerful advocate for opportunities for all in areas such as education and government.
What follows is a wide-ranging conversation about Martínez’s upbringing, becoming a writer, and the importance of continuing on despite the obstacles placed in front of us.
Adriana, welcome. Many writers can point to the moment they decided they wanted to become authors. Was there a similar moment for you, or did Reclaiming Me emerge from something deeper?
I've always loved writing, but this memoir—which I finally published about a year and a half ago—was truly a labor of love. It was something I'd wanted to write for years.
At some point I realized I wanted to leave something lasting for my children, Citlali and Diego, who are now both in college. I wanted them to know my story—not just the events of my life, but the lessons I learned along the way.
I also wanted to reach young people, especially children of immigrants like me. I hoped the book might offer encouragement, advice, maybe even a little wisdom.
Writing it became a healing process. As a middle-aged woman, I found myself looking back over my life, returning to the lessons I first learned as a child and trying to understand how those experiences shaped me. That's really where the title Reclaiming Me comes from. Writing the book was an act of self-care as much as storytelling.
Memoirs often arrive because the writer feels an urgency—not simply to remember, but because the present moment demands that the story be told. Did you feel that urgency?
Very much so.
Throughout my life I've been passionate about making sure immigrant families, people living in poverty, and communities like the one where I grew up in Boyle Heights have access to opportunities. I've always believed that education can open doors for children who grow up where I did.
In recent years, though, that feeling became even stronger. So many families feel invisible. They feel unheard. They're struggling through injustice, and we seem to be seeing more of that every day.
I realized this book might resonate with those families. Personally, it also happened to coincide with my children leaving for college. Suddenly I had the time I'd never had before. I told myself, You've wanted to write this book for years. Stop waiting. So I disciplined myself and finally did it.
Before writing the memoir, were there particular memoirists or writers who influenced your approach?
Not consciously. Writing has simply always been part of my life.
As a little girl, I entered Young Authors conferences at school. I attended Utah Street Elementary in Boyle Heights, and I loved creating little stories.
Later, in college, I kept journals constantly. At Stanford, I co-founded a student publication called Expression with several classmates. It became a place where students could publish writing, photography, and visual art—a space where people could express themselves freely.
So when I finally sat down to write Reclaiming Me, I wasn't trying to imitate another writer. I was drawing on a lifetime of writing in different forms.
I think you're being a little modest. One of the remarkable things about your memoir isn't simply that you became a writer—it's where you came from. Before readers understand Stanford or your later accomplishments, they need to understand Boyle Heights. Could you paint that world for us?
The opening chapter of my memoir does exactly that.
Some of my earliest memories are from when I was only three years old. My family moved into Aliso Village, and those memories have stayed with me vividly.
That apartment remained home until I was in my late twenties. Even after I had gone away to school, that's where I came home.
The projects were rough. There's no denying that.
But inside our apartment, my parents created something completely different. That's where I learned some of the most important lessons of my life.
We lived in a two-story corner apartment facing the freeways. Downstairs there was a small kitchen and living room. The stairs went directly up to two bedrooms and a single bathroom.
People are often surprised when I tell them we didn't even have a shower—only a bathtub. There wasn't room for a dryer either, so my mother hung our clothes outside on a clothesline. Sometimes clothing disappeared before it finished drying.
Those details may seem small, but they tell you something about daily life there. They were ordinary realities, yet they became part of the foundation that shaped me.
Excellent. This next section naturally shifts from describing Aliso Village to exploring family history and migration. I've also strengthened your questions so they do more work and allow Adriana to tell a fuller story. Rather than asking a series of factual questions ("Where were your parents born?" "Where did they meet?"), the interview becomes an exploration of identity, migration, memory, and inheritance.
Your memoir is also a family history. As you begin telling your own story, you quickly discover you're really telling your parents' story as well. Where did that story begin?
It's interesting because I devote an entire chapter to my parents.
People are often surprised to learn that my father was actually born in Chicago in 1930. His parents had come to the United States for work, but after that work ended they returned to Mexico, so he grew up there. When he was about seventeen, he crossed back into the United States, working in the fields like so many immigrants of his generation.
Unfortunately, my father died when I was still young, so I never had the opportunity to ask him all the questions I wish I could ask now. As we grow older, we become more curious about our parents' lives, about the choices they made, and about everything that came before us. I didn't have enough time with him to hear all those stories.
That absence becomes part of the memoir. You're writing not only from memory but also around the places where memory can no longer reach.
Your father belonged to a generation shaped by migration between Mexico and the United States. Did you ever learn much about your grandfather's experience?
Only pieces of it.
I believe my grandfather participated in one of the government labor programs, although I don't know exactly which one. I remember hearing that he worked on the railroad. My father didn't speak very much about those years.
What I do know is that his family moved frequently. One of his sisters was born in New Mexico, another was born in Mexico, and my father was born in Chicago before being raised in Jalisco, in a town called Mexica, about two hours from Guadalajara.
There are still many parts of that history I wish I knew better.
Reading your memoir, I couldn't help thinking about how many Mexican families lived through cycles of migration that were shaped by government policy—the demand for labor, followed by deportation and displacement. Even when those policies aren't explicitly discussed at home, they leave traces that pass from one generation to the next.
Absolutely. Those experiences become part of a family's history, even when they're not fully spoken about. My father carried those experiences with him, whether he talked about them or not.
Your mother represents another migration story altogether.
Tell me about her.
My mother came from a tiny rancho called Ceseda in Durango. It was incredibly remote and very poor.
Every summer my sister and I would travel there with her. Those trips became some of the defining memories of my childhood.
There was no indoor plumbing when we first visited. We'd use an outhouse—or sometimes there wasn't even that. Water had to be carried in, baths were taken from buckets, there was no telephone, and life moved at a completely different pace.
Those summers connected us to another world. They reminded us where our family came from and how difficult life had been for earlier generations.
How did your mother make her way to Los Angeles?
She first came through El Paso.
Before settling in Los Angeles, she worked in Texas as a domestic worker, cleaning homes for families. Eventually she moved west with her younger sister and several close friends she had met there.
When we were children, every summer we made the journey back to Durango by bus. We'd ride a Greyhound to El Paso, cross into Ciudad Juárez, and then board a Mexican bus to Torreón before traveling the final stretch to the rancho.
Those were long trips, but they became part of our family rhythm.
One of the most moving parts of your memoir is the way your parents seem to embody two different temperaments. Your father is joyful, musical, always dancing. Your mother is disciplined, practical, deeply reserved. Together they create the emotional center of the book.
How did they find each other?
Boyle Heights.
Everything seems to lead back to Boyle Heights.
My father loved music. He loved dancing. He was incredibly proud of his Mexican heritage, and I inherited that passion from him.
My mother was completely different. She was quiet, serious, and shy. She never drank, never danced. But her younger sister wanted to go dancing one evening, so my mother reluctantly agreed to go with her to a dance hall in Boyle Heights.
That's where she met my father.
She told him she didn't know how to dance.
He smiled and said, "Yo tampoco. We can learn together."
Of course, he was lying.
He was actually an excellent dancer.
That's how their story began.
That story says something beautiful about memory. Even after decades, your parents' first dance remains one of the moments you carry with you.
It does.
When I think about my parents, I think about that joy. Even though they faced tremendous hardship later in life, that's one of the memories I never wanted to lose. Writing the memoir allowed me to preserve those moments—not just for my children, but for anyone who wants to understand where our family came from.
One of the remarkable things about Reclaiming Me is that Boyle Heights never feels like a backdrop. It becomes a character in its own right—a place filled with contradiction, where hardship and beauty exist side by side. Today, many readers know Boyle Heights through conversations about redevelopment and gentrification. But your memoir preserves a version of the neighborhood that no longer exists. Did you feel a responsibility to document that world before it disappeared?
Absolutely.
Writing those opening chapters was actually joyful because I was remembering a place that shaped me. I didn't want to lose those memories.
The Aliso Village Housing Projects no longer exist. They were demolished in the mid-1990s and replaced by Pueblo del Sol through a public-private redevelopment project. Years later, while I was working for Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard, I was involved in helping secure federal funding connected with that redevelopment through HUD.
Even now, whenever we drive by, I tell my children, "That's where I grew up. Right there on that corner."
The buildings are gone, but the memories remain, and I wanted to preserve them before they disappeared completely.
What I appreciate is that you resist romanticizing poverty. Your childhood contains warmth and community, but it also contains the daily realities that accompany economic hardship. You write about annual fumigations, cockroaches, clotheslines, overcrowding—details that many readers might overlook, yet they reveal how poverty shapes everyday life.
Exactly.
My mother was incredibly clean. Every year she would empty every cabinet, cover everything in the apartment, and prepare for the fumigation.
She worked constantly to keep our home spotless.
But poverty doesn't always allow cleanliness to protect you.
If neighboring apartments had infestations, the cockroaches simply came into yours as well. It didn't matter how hard you worked.
Those are the kinds of details I wanted readers to understand—not because I wanted sympathy, but because that was simply our reality.
That's an important distinction. Sometimes people misunderstand poverty as an individual failing when, in reality, it's often structural. Many of the parents in Aliso Village were working twelve-hour shifts in garment factories, restaurants, warehouses, or construction. They weren't unwilling to work—they were exhausted. When thousands of people are concentrated in aging public housing with very limited resources, many of those conditions become inevitable.
Your memoir helps readers understand that complexity.
That's exactly right.
Those experiences weren't unique to my family. They were shared by so many families who lived there.
That's why it felt important to write them down.
Yet inside that larger story is a very intimate family story. Your father's illness becomes one of the emotional threads running through the memoir. Can you talk about what your family experienced during those years?
My father was diabetic.
When my sister and I were in junior high, he lost his job at Magic Chef, where he worked as an assembler. The company offered him the opportunity to relocate to Ohio, but he didn't want to leave Los Angeles, so he stayed.
After that, everything became much more difficult.
Because of his diabetes, he repeatedly failed the physical examinations required for new jobs. I still remember him coming home saying, "No pasé el físico."
He wanted to work.
He was capable of working.
But he couldn't get past that first hurdle.
Looking back now, I also realize he was suffering from depression, although at the time we didn't have the language to recognize it.
His physical illness, the stress of unemployment, and what I now understand to have been depression all compounded one another.
As a child, I couldn't fully understand what was happening.
As an adult, I see it very differently.
One of the strengths of memoir is that adulthood gives us language children don't yet possess. The child experiences confusion. The adult recognizes depression, economic displacement, chronic illness, and systems that failed someone who wanted desperately to provide for his family.
Your memoir holds both truths at once.
That's exactly how I think about it now.
At the time, I only knew my father wasn't home very often.
He traveled to do seasonal farm work. Sometimes he returned to Mexico to visit his parents. My mother carried the household for long stretches while he searched for work or tried to recover.
I wouldn't say she was entirely a single mother because he remained part of our lives, but she certainly carried most of the responsibility for raising us during those years.
She was the steady presence in our home.
Reading those chapters, I kept thinking that your memoir isn't simply about resilience. It's about dignity. Your parents never stop trying. Your father continues looking for work despite repeated rejection. Your mother continues holding the family together.
Neither one gives up.
I think that's exactly what they taught me.
They modeled perseverance every single day.
They never spoke much about sacrifice.
They simply lived it.
Looking back, I realize how extraordinary that example was, and I wanted my children—and my readers—to understand the quiet strength they carried with them.
Reclaiming Me doesn't unfold in a strictly chronological way. Instead, it moves through memory almost the way memory actually works—returning to certain moments, circling back, discovering new meanings in old experiences.
At what point did you realize the book didn't want to be told as a linear autobiography?
Honestly, I don't think I knew that from the beginning.
Years ago—back in 2001 or 2002—I enrolled in a writing workshop taught by Josefina López. I thought I was signing up for a memoir workshop, but it turned out to be a screenwriting class.
At first I thought, I don't want to write a screenplay.
But I stayed.
I completed the screenplay, put it on my bookshelf, and it stayed there for nearly twenty years.
When I finally began writing Reclaiming Me, that screenplay became the starting point. Much of it centered on my relationship with my father and my memories of watching him struggle through illness and depression. Eventually that material evolved into one chapter of the memoir.
The rest of the book grew from there.
So the memoir wasn't outlined from beginning to end. It accumulated. Almost one remembered life at a time.
Exactly.
I didn't have any formal background in writing a book. I knew I had stories, but I didn't really know how to organize them.
So I hired a writing coach.
The coach wasn't there to tell me what to write. The biggest gift was accountability.
I promised myself I would finish at least one chapter every two months. I would send that chapter to my coach, receive feedback, and then begin the next one.
Eventually those individual chapters became a book.
That's interesting because readers often assume a memoir begins with a master plan. But your process sounds much closer to excavation. You uncovered one memory, understood what it meant, and only then moved to the next.
That's exactly right.
I would think back as far as I possibly could.
Then I would ask myself a different question—not simply What happened? but What did I learn?
Every chapter begins with an experience, but it ends with a lesson.
For example, I write about struggling with my weight as a little girl.
That chapter isn't really about weight.
It's about discipline.
It's about discovering, at a young age, that if I committed myself to something, I could change my circumstances.
That lesson stayed with me for the rest of my life.
Whenever I faced another challenge, I remembered that little girl who decided she was capable of changing.
That helps explain the structure. The chapters aren't connected by chronology. They're connected by transformation. Each memory marks a moment when the person you eventually became first began to emerge.
Yes.
That's really how I approached the book.
I wasn't trying to write a complete history of my life.
I was trying to understand the milestones that shaped me.
Some chapters are about faith.
Others are about Roosevelt High School.
Others are about my family.
But each chapter asks the same question:
What did this experience teach me?
That's what ties the memoir together.
One of the things I admired most is that Reclaiming Me trusts readers. The book doesn't insist that every lesson be stated outright. Instead, meaning accumulates across the chapters.
By the end, readers begin to understand that every experience—whether joyful or painful—has contributed to the person speaking to us.
I appreciate that.
That was certainly my hope.
I wanted readers to recognize themselves in those experiences.
The details of our lives may be different, but I think many people have moments that become turning points.
Those were the moments I wanted to preserve.
Memoir asks writers to negotiate an impossible balance. On one hand there's factual accuracy. On the other there's emotional truth. Memory isn't a transcript. It's an interpretation. How did you think about that balance while writing?
Emotional truth was always the priority.
More than anything, I wanted readers to understand how those moments felt.
Finding language for those emotions wasn't easy, but it mattered more to me than recreating every detail perfectly.
Were there moments when memory simply refused to cooperate?
Absolutely.
There were places where I couldn't remember the precise sequence of events.
For example, when I wrote about meeting the young man from Salinas—who later became my husband—I couldn't remember exactly when certain things happened.
Did he give me that gift before this event or afterward?
What happened first?
Sometimes I took a small amount of creative license with those details because the emotional truth remained exactly the same.
The relationship.
The feeling.
The experience.
Those never changed.
That's one of the enduring questions in contemporary memoir. Readers don't expect perfect recall. They expect honesty. There's a difference between inventing events and acknowledging that memory arranges experience according to meaning rather than chronology.
Exactly.
I never wanted to distort what happened.
If I adjusted anything, it was only a very small detail that helped the story read more naturally.
The larger truth always remained intact.
In fact, it's interesting that some of my earliest memories are the clearest ones.
I can still remember arriving at Aliso Village when I was three years old, holding my father's hand.
That memory has never faded.
It feels as vivid today as it did then.
Rodriguez: One of the themes running quietly through Reclaiming Me is education—not simply schooling, but education as possibility. Your journey from the Aliso Village Housing Projects to Stanford University can easily be read as an individual success story, but I don't think that's what you're trying to say. It seems to me you're arguing something much larger: that talent has always existed in communities like Boyle Heights. What's often missing is opportunity.
People sometimes look at my story and think it's exceptional, but I don't see it that way.
I grew up surrounded by incredibly bright young people. The difference wasn't intelligence or ability. The difference was opportunity.
That's why education has always been so important to me.
I've spent my career trying to make sure children from communities like mine have access to the kinds of opportunities that can change the course of a life.
Roosevelt High School occupies an important place in your memoir. For many readers outside Los Angeles, it's simply another public high school. But for those of us who know East Los Angeles, Roosevelt represents generations of artists, scholars, musicians, activists, athletes, and public servants. The school has produced extraordinary people despite enormous structural challenges.
That's exactly how I remember it.
When I look back, I don't think of Roosevelt as a place lacking talent.
I think of it as a place overflowing with talent.
The students were extraordinary.
The question wasn't whether they were capable.
The question was whether someone would encourage them, believe in them, and help them see possibilities they couldn't yet imagine.
That's why I write about the overcrowded classrooms and the limited resources—not to criticize the students, but to show the obstacles they were navigating every day.
We often celebrate a valedictorian as though one student somehow represents excellence.
But schools like Roosevelt contain hundreds of remarkable young people whose gifts simply aren't measured by class rank. Some become artists. Some become entrepreneurs. Some become caregivers. Some become community leaders. Their contributions rarely fit neatly into traditional definitions of academic success.
I completely agree.
One of the things I hope readers understand is that greatness exists everywhere.
Sometimes all a young person needs is someone who says, "You belong here."
That encouragement can change everything.
For me, education became the doorway to a different future, but it never separated me from where I came from.
If anything, it strengthened my commitment to communities like Boyle Heights.
Going to Stanford must have been both exhilarating and disorienting. Many first-generation students describe feeling as though they're constantly translating between two worlds. Did you experience that?
Very much so.
Stanford opened extraordinary doors for me, but I never felt that I was leaving Boyle Heights behind.
In many ways, I carried Boyle Heights with me.
The values my parents taught me—hard work, humility, perseverance, and gratitude—became my foundation.
Those values mattered just as much as anything I learned in the classroom.
That's one of the quiet achievements of your memoir. You never suggest success requires abandoning your community. Instead, education becomes a bridge. You move into different spaces while remaining accountable to the place that formed you.
That's exactly how I see it.
I've always believed that success carries responsibility.
The opportunities I've had create an obligation to help create opportunities for others.
That's really been the guiding principle throughout my career.
Reading Reclaiming Me, I found myself thinking that you weren't writing simply to remember. You were writing to leave a map. Almost every chapter asks the reader, "Here's what I learned. Perhaps it can help you too."
Was that always part of your intention?
Yes.
Very much so.
I wanted my children to know where they came from.
I wanted young people—especially children of immigrants—to know that difficult beginnings do not determine the rest of their lives.
Every chapter contains a lesson because those lessons are what stayed with me.
If someone else can take strength from them, then writing the memoir was worth it.
The memoir ends, but the work it describes clearly doesn't. You continue advocating for educational opportunity, public service, and immigrant communities. Has writing the memoir changed the way you understand your own life?
I think it has.
Writing required me to slow down and really look at my life in ways I hadn't before.
I had to revisit difficult memories, joyful memories, and moments I had almost forgotten.
In doing so, I came to appreciate my parents even more.
I also came to appreciate how every challenge had prepared me for the work I've spent my career doing.
Writing the memoir wasn't simply about recording the past.
It helped me understand it.
Adriana Martínez' website links to a purchase site. You can order the work via independent booksellers, and Libromobile (link)
Rey Rodriguez is a Los Angeles writer. His current work, Todos Somos Sagrados, has drawn accolades from reviewers and enthusiastic audiences in readings, including this review in La Bloga (link). Southern Californians can join Rey as interviewee and Obed Silva as interviewer, at Pasadena's indie bookseller, Vroman's on Sunday August 9 at the reasonable hour of 1500, 3:00 p.m.
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