111 pages • 3 hours read
Reyna GrandeThe Distance Between Us
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaBook 2, Chapters 10-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2, Chapter 10 Summary
After a year in America, Reyna’s father tells her and her siblings that their mother, too, is in America and has been for months. Furthermore, she has left Betty behind in Mexico, has a three-month-old son, and is living with a boyfriend in Los Angeles. When Carlos asks permission to visit her, their father replies, “Your mother doesn’t care about you” (220). Reyna and her siblings, confused and scared, argue with him about whether they can, or even should, visit her. Reyna discovers that an aunt will soon be bringing Betty to America, abandoning her own daughter—Reyna’s cousin—in the process: “I hoped that one day the cycle of leaving children behind would end” (222).
Reyna and her siblings finally visit their mother and Betty, but Betty, age five, doesn’t remember them. Their mother lives in squalor, having only one private room. She has to share kitchen and bath facilities with other tenants and works in a garment factory. Mago asks why she didn’t inform them of her arrival in America. She answers that she wanted them to have time with their father, but Reyna is doubtful: “It was then that I finally understood the kind of person my mother had become. And how little space she was willing to make for us in her life” (225). They continue to visit twice a month. Although their mother is able to take them on outings, they are disgusted to see that she collects cans from the street to sell to a recycling center. Still, Reyna wishes that her parents could reunite and her family could return to normal.
Book 2, Chapter 11 Summary
Reyna’s father encourages her and her siblings to study hard and work hard so that they can find careers and retire comfortably. He also reports that he is in the process of getting legal status for all of them, starting by officially marrying Mila, who is an American citizen. Reyna’s mother, however, has been fending only for herself, with no concern for her children’s future.
In 1987, Mago becomes the first in the family to attend high school. Reyna is jealous because her father buys Mago new clothes. Furthermore, when Reyna starts junior high school, a teacher informs her that Mago—or Maggie, as she is known at school—was one of his best students. Although Reyna is pleased to be in a general ESL class instead of being stuck in a corner with native speakers, she feels pressure to live up to her father’s and teacher’s expectations. In PE class, the teacher makes fun of her name—which translates as big queen—and asks if Reyna would mind being called Princess.
Still struggling to express herself in English, she finds an escape in music class and begins to play saxophone: “I loved playing an instrument because I knew that it didn’t matter whether I spoke prefect English or not. It didn’t matter that I had a ‘wetback’ accent” (232).
Her father, amazed that Reyna can borrow the saxophone for free, recounts an event from his childhood. In third grade, he played drums at school and dreamed of joining the color guard. At the age of nine, however, he dropped out of school to work the fields with his father: “I never got to play the drum again. And I’ve been working ever since” (233).
Book 2, Chapter 12 Summary
Because of gang violence, Reyna’s father forbids the children from playing outside. Members of the Avenues gang live next door and steal water from their garden house. Reyna’s family hears gunfire nearly every night. On one occasion, a gang member is shot in front of their house. Reyna’s father, not wanting to get involved, refuses to help; he explains to Reyna that if they help, they will get shot. Reyna watches though the window as paramedics lay the dead man on the sidewalk. The following day, Reyna’s father enrolls in English classes, determined to improve his prospects so that they can move into a safer neighborhood: “My father’s desire for a better life was palpable. It was contagious. It was one of the things I most respected about him” (237).
A few weeks later, Reyna’s father learns that his sister Emperatriz has convinced his mother to sign over the deed to the property where he has built a home in Mexico. Reyna and her siblings know how important that house was for him but adds that it was “an investment that had cost us our relationship with our parents, that cost Mami her marriage with my father. The price for that house had been too high to pay […] And now, it had been stolen from him” (238).
Despite Mila’s pleas to remain in America, Reyna’s father returns to Mexico to get his house back, even if being caught reentering will cost him his chance to get a green card. After two weeks, he returns, despondent. The house is no longer his, and he gives up on taking English classes.
Book 2, Chapter 13 Summary
By the time eighth grade starts, Reyna is pleased that she has begun to menstruate without the ordeal that Mago endured. Also, she has completed the ESL program and can join regular classes. Naturally withdrawn, she spends most of her free time reading and is especially interest in the works of V.C. Andrews because she can relate to the themes of family abuse and negligence. She learns of another writing contest and decides to enter, hoping to win and get her father’s approval. She is also proud that she is now able to write in English: “In my writing, you couldn’t hear my accent, which is why playing the sax, writing, and drawing were my favorite ways of expressing myself” (242).
To her delight, Grande wins first prize in the school contest; the prize includes a blue ribbon and two tickets to a cruise ship. Certain now that she can please her father, she imagines the two of them on board the Queen Mary, holding hands as the ship heads out to sea. She is disappointed to learn that the tickets earn her the right only to board the ship—it will not be traveling anywhere. Her disappointment increases that evening when she proudly announces to her father that she has won first prize; he is not interested in visiting the ship and refuses to take her.
Book 2, Chapter 14 Summary
Reyna falls in love with a boy named Luis. Initially, her friend Phuong, asks her to act as cupid, but Luis is more interested in Reyna than Phuong. Out shopping for her father one evening, Reyna comes across Luis. He delays her, and they kiss. When Reyna returns home late, her father interrogates her, so she decides to run off and live with her mother. He chases her down the street and—with Luis and his friends watching—drags her home by the hair, then whips her with his belt. The following Monday at school, both Luis and Phuong ignore her. She consoles herself by finding a quiet spot at school to read, thinking, “Maybe Luis thought like my mother and father. Maybe, it was just too easy to leave me” (249).
Book 2, Chapters 10-14 Analysis
Learning English is still a source of trouble. Reyna’s English continues to improve, though she still has some obstacles. She is able to get into a special classroom dedicated only to English learners, instead of being tucked away in the corner. Playing the saxophone also allows her to express herself without the burden of having to perfect her accent. Her father, too, begins taking English classes, but he gives up, disheartened after losing his home. Additionally, in eighth grade, she can finally join regular English classes and give up her “status as an ESL student” (240). Still, she faces some humiliation when she makes a mistake; for example, she says that she has hurt her big finger, rather than big toe. In Spanish, the word for finger and toe is the same: “Why did English have to be so complicated?” (231). Her greatest achievement is when she wins first place in a writing contest. She is proud not only that she has won, but also that her English is almost as good as native speakers’.
The process of learning English becomes linked to her changing sense of identity. Not wanting to be compared to Mago, Reyna agrees to let a teacher call her Princess instead of her real name. Additionally, when she and her siblings advance into regular English classes, their allegiances switch. Mago, Reyna writes, “moved in ‘better circles’ now that she’d gotten a good grasp of the English language” (246). Carlos’s English has improved, but he still spends time with his ESL friends, and Reyna follows his lead: “I was not ashamed, as Mago was, of people knowing where I came from” (246).
Grande further explores the intersection of memory and imagination. Her father, not a naturally talkative person, tells Reyna of his short time in school, when he played drums. Reyna turns his memory into inspiration, playing the saxophone for him, “who never got another chance to play anything” (233). Her father’s dreams are again crushed when he loses his dream home—the home he first imagined and then built. Reyna remembers all the time spent carrying bricks and mortar with her siblings: “I thought about the years that Papi was gone, that Mami was gone, so that they could build that dream house” (239). Last, after her first kiss, Reyna doesn’t want her father to ruin the memory of it, asking why he couldn’t just leave her alone to “replay the most important moment of my life again and again without disruption” (248).
Grande also builds on the motifs of not letting go and fairy tales. When Reyna visits her mother and Betty, Grande writes that she and her siblings were “once again following the bread crumbs back to Mami” (222). Witnessing a murder in front of her house, she stares at the corpse and pool of blood: “I reached to grab my father’s hand, and he squeezed mine tight” (236). When she wins tickets to visit the Queen Mary, she imagines herself and her father onboard “holding hands, and not letting go as we became surrounded in azure” (243).
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