After illegally crossing the border with their father, it takes Reyna and her siblings years to get their green cards-all the while, their mother and father face the same struggle, and are eventually beneficiaries of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which legalized undocumented immigrants who entered the United States before January 1st, 1982, but also required employers to know and attest to their employees’ immigration status and made it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Reyna’s family’s struggles with poverty, disease, and abuse are exacerbated by financial turmoil and recession in Mexico, combined with tense and tenuous border politics that prevent them from legally coming to the United States.

The events of The Distance Between Us span the entirety of Reyna’s childhood and adolescence in Mexico and the United States, covering a period of about 20 years, from 1980-when Reyna was four-to 1999, when she graduated from college at UC Santa Cruz. The author of two novels and two memoirs, Grande is the winner of an American Book Award and an International Book Award, and she currently teaches creative writing at UCLA and several writing conferences around the country. Reyna went on to attain degrees from Pasadena City College, UC Santa Cruz, and Antioch College. Reyna found creative writing as an outlet both for self-expression and as a means of proving to her father that she was taking advantage of the precious opportunity of a life in America. In Los Angeles, Reyna and her siblings adjusted to life in America, all the while fearing their controlling, alcoholic father’s punishments for the slightest transgression. When she was eight years old, her father brought her and her siblings Mago and Carlos to live with him in Los Angeles, subjecting them to a harrowing and illegal border crossing. Her parents went to the United States to pursue greater financial opportunities, leaving her and her siblings in the care of an abusive grandmother. Reyna Grande grew up in poverty in Iguala for the first eight years of her life.

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