A Dream for Gilberto: An Immigrant Family's Struggle to Become American
- Book Review,
by Biloine W. Young
From Library Journal
Both books are well written and help the reader understand the faces behind the statistics. Barefoot Heart is more lyrical, reading like a novel, and is appropriate for junior high through adult readers and even book groups. A Dream for Gilberto is more of a case study and will be appreciated by slightly older readers as well as teachers and other professionals working with the Latino population. Both are recommended for public libraries.ADeborah Bigelow, Leonia P.L., NJ Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
—Moises Loza, Executive Director, Housing Assistance Council (HAC), Washington, DC
"... [r]eading the book brought back memories.... I would find myself nodding...that...was the way it happened."
—Patricia Fernandez-Kelley, Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
“The book . . . arouses deep empathy for the courage of ordinary people overcoming extraordinary obstacles."
—Dr. Howard D. Paap, Professor of Anthropology, Century College
"Gilberto's struggle, his dream, burns in the reader's memory long after finishing the book . . . .
—Carol Bly, author “Changing the Bully who Rules the World
"A perfect case for the new social-science emphasis on the Narrative.... for people who like literature..."
Frederick Kirchoff, Dean, Metropolitan St. University, College of Arts and Crafts, St. Paul, Minnesota
"I found the book a deeply moving narrative. Gilberto is a . . . man whose strengths (his dogged determination to do what he thinks best) are also his ruin."
Dr. Howard D. Paap, Professor of Anthropology, Century College
"Gilberto's struggle, his dream, burns in the reader's memory long after finishing the book . . . . [This book] reminds us of the struggles of other worlds, of how we too often refuse to see, to acknowledge, reality."
Carol Bly, Author, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World
"A perfect case for the new social-science emphasis on the Narrative . . . . We are returning to respect for the individual story as the most, not the least, reliable source of truth. Here it is for people who like literature and people who practice in the helping professions."
Patricia Fernandez-Kelley, Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
A Dream For Gilberto is a welcome addition to a literature whose authors insist on portraying migrants as more than interlopers. Billie Young writes with rare sensibility, blending personal testimony with a detailed account of a single, determined individual and his family.
Book Description
A Dream for Gilberto is the true story of one man's dreams and his epic struggle to fulfill them. Born into the direst of third world poverty, sleeping on the streets of a South American city, Gilberto, while yet a boy, absorbed the basic lesson of his life: that only by clinging to his dreams, no matter how irrational they appeared to others, would he be able to survive. Gilberto's earliest dreams were of his family, destroyed when he was a young child. He spent much of his youth in a search for his mother and lost siblings. Another dream was to immigrate to the United Statesan impossibility until the day a bizarre circumstance again changed his life.
From the Publisher
Billie Young is an established writer, having published six books prior to A Dream for Gilberto. In this book she explores the experiences of an Hispanic immigrant family's struggle to, first, become a family, and second, to become an "American family. Young adopts the method of anthropologist Oscar Lewis, with whom she has worked, in revealing the often poignant struggles of immigrants in adapting to American culture. She lets her subjects tell their own story, in their own words, restricting her own commentary primarily to describing the social, cultural and historical contexts within which the immigrant story itself unfolds. In other words, Young adds the detail to what are often abstract social-science statistics.
From the Author
In the early 1950's my husband and I , adventurous young Americans with freshly minted college degrees, set out to seek our fortune in South America. During the five years we lived there I founded and directed the United States cultural center in Cali, Colombia, and hired as an office boy a street kid named Gilberto. Gilberto was barely literate, had spent part of his youth living under a Cali bridge, and struggled to master the job skills of a messenger. Twenty-five years after we left Colombia , in the late 1970's, I again met Gilberto. This time we were in a Kansas City diner and, Gilberto, no longer a messenger, was a university graduate and teacher for the Kansas City Public Schools. Against almost impossible odds, he had brought not only himself but six members of his family to the United States. After that Kansas City meeting I again lost track of Gilberto until, 16 years later, assisted with a grant, I located him and every member of his family. With a graduate degree in Latin American history and having worked with famed anthropologist Oscar Lewis, I was full of questions. How had Gilberto and members of his family made the transition from Latin American poverty to life in the United States? What values from their former home had they held to and which had they abandoned? Had they truly become Americans or were they still dreaming of the greener hills of home? The story of Gilberto and his brothers is a tale of life and literature combinedof struggle and failure and the alchemy of hope. It is a story that everyone who has shipped out over the edge of the world to a new land will recognize as his own.
About the Author
Biloine (Billie) W. Young has written for such diverse publications as the Saturday Review of Literature, Modern Language Journal, Phi Delta Kappan, and Cosmopolitan Magazine. While editor of the Lamoni Chronicle (Iowa) she won numerous awards including one for editor of the best weekly newspaper in the United States edited by a woman! She is the author of six published books, one of which was a 1996 Minnesota Book Award Nominee. Another book, also published in 1996, was favorably reviewed on the internet by Amazon Books.com. Young holds degrees in English and Journalism from the University of Kansas ( Lawrence) and a graduate degree from the University of Illinois (Urbana) in Communications and Latin American History. While at the University of Illinois she worked with famed anthropologist, Oscar Lewis, on two books published subsequent to Children of Sanchez, his landmark study of poverty in Mexico. In Cali, Colombia, Young founded the Centro Cultural Colombo-Americano, an institution to disseminate the English language and culture of the United States to Colombia adults. Young and her late husband, Dr. George P. Young, former superintendent of the St. Paul Public Schools, have four grown children and seven grandchildren.
Excerpted from A Dream for Gilberto : An Immigrant Family's Struggle to Become American by Biloine W. Young. Copyright © 1990. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: As he started to speak Gilberto leaned forward toward the recorder, concerned that the machine would not pick up his words. But after the first sentence he forgot the recorder, sat back in the booth with his head against the padded vinyl and gazed past me, past the counters and the neon signs and the green glass of toothpicks by the cash register to his memories of the battered children in a mountain village of Colombia. My main memory as a child is of one day being gathered all together with my brothers and sisters and being put into two boxes that were tied on the sides of a donkey. We were all very small and we were being taken somewhere. My father led the donkey. I dont know where my mother was, but she was not with us. From time to time we were moved around in the boxes and once my father took me out of the box and put me on the rump of the donkey. I can see myself on top of the donkey, at the back, and not being able to hold on and sliding from the rump and my father picking me up and trying to make me go back up on the donkey again. I kept falling off because I did not know how to hold on. We crossed a big river and rode this way a long time, traveling from Trujillo to Tulua to Sevilla until we finally got to Cali. When we arrived in Cali my father took us children to the central market place and put us on display like an exhibit. We sat on the ground in the center of a group of people who were looking at us as if we were a curiosity of some kind. We huddled together and were very frightened. I later learned that my father had arranged to have some papers drawn up so that he could give us away. People walked around us and looked at us and then one would come up and say, 'I want that little boy,' or 'I want that little girl.' Gilberto fell silent as a waitress approached. The charge in the air between us must have been apparent because the waitress gave us a curious look as she refilled our coffee cups. We had both stopped talking as she approached and the silence hung like a cloud over the booth as we waited for her to leave. She stood over us a moment longer than necessary, her eyes fixed on the black box of the tape recorder where it sat on the table, precisely equidistant between the two of us, the tape reels turning slowly. We waited, as silent as the recorder. The diner smelled of reheated bitter coffee, cigarettes and drugstore cologne. Plates clattered on the plastic coated table in the booth behind us. Then the moment passed and the waitress spun away, her coffee pot held before her like a flag. It was the winter of 1978 and I was sitting in a booth of an all-night diner in Kansas City, Missouri. Across from me sat Gilberto Alzate, a man who, though he had once been an employee of mine in Cali, Colombia, South America, I had not seen, nor seldom thought about, for a quarter of a century. It was not by chance that we were meeting. My meeting with Gilberto had been prompted, in part, by my interest in how immigrants adjust to life in the United States. It seemed to me that the experiences of immigrants from Latin America, both legal and illegal, had been largely ignored. Through mutual friends, who had brought me up-to-date on his life, I had located Gilberto in Kansas City and had driven from my home in St. Paul, Minnesota to talk with him. * * * Sitting with him in the booth of the diner, I became aware once again of the strength and passion of Gilbertos personality and grew embarrassed to remember the indifference with which I had once regarded him. I had driven from St. Paul to Kansas City because I wanted to learn all I could about his past life. What had happened to him, both in Colombia and in the United States, to turn him into the person that he now was? Gilberto, I realized, had become an articulate repository of information about a culture and a part of the world which, though I had once lived there, I discovered that I knew very little. Here, smiling across the table at me with his frank gaze, was an immigrant-one whom I had known before the thought of leaving his homeland had ever occurred to him. He and his fellow immigrants from Latin America formed this countrys fastest growing population, had the highest rate of male participation in the labor force, and the lowest use of public assistance. I determined, through Gilberto, to learn more about them and the adjustments they had made in coming to the United States.
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