Crux

March 26, 2018
A daughter probes her troubled family history and her own stormy psyche in this melodramatic memoir. Journalist Guerrero, a reporter for KPBS in San Diego, recounts her fraught relationship with her father, Marco, a charismatic Mexican immigrant who started a family in San Diego with her mother, a Puerto Rico–born doctor. Her father became a crack addict who wrapped himself in aluminum foil to keep the CIA from beaming voices into his head. His is just one strand of colorful family history: Marco’s mother had to marry his father, who raped and abducted her; a great-great-grandmother was a curandera witch, foreshadowing Marco’s shamanistic studies; Guerrero herself grapples with adolescent angst, self-cutting, dangerous men, and psychedelic drugs. (“The whole universe rushed in through every pore of my body, causing me to swell and expand at the speed of light,” she reports from an ecstasy-fueled rave.) Guerrero’s meditations on cultural border-crossings feel unfocused and unearned since her well-to-do family crosses back and forth between Mexico and the United States on a regular basis with little difficulty; meanwhile, the disjointed narrative takes major offense to minor mishaps—“Mexico wanted me dead,” she broods after falling uninjured into a hole in Mexico City—and bogs down in teary bickering between family members. The result is an overwrought, uninvolving multigenerational soap opera with some trauma and eccentricity, but not a lot of emotional power.