La Luz Libre

The Distance Between Us: a Memoir, by award-winning author Reyna Grande, tells the story of her early years growing up in poverty in Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. This beautiful and wrenching account is lyrical, unsentimental, and deeply respectful of its characters – her family, neighbors, townspeople, and countrymen.

The stories, characters, and small black and white photos in the book are very familiar to me - they remind me of the life of of my wife Maritza's late father, José Maria Delgadillo, who also grew up in a small rural town in Mexico, in the state of Jalisco.

About halfway through the book, Reyna talks about living with her thee siblings and mother in the bamboo-walled shack of her maternal grandmother, Abuelita Chinta. She describes a life without running water, toilets, consistent electricity, and many other amenities we can't imaging living without today, including anything beyond "bare bulb" electric light. This sentence grabbed my attention:

"In the evenings, the fireflies came out, and we caught them and put them into a jar. We brought them into the house and set them on the table to light up the house."

This short passage exemplifies so much about the book and the lives of Reyna and her siblings: their relentless optimism; their resilience in the face of considerable hardship, neglect, and abuse; their transcendent dreams of making it in El Otro Lado (the U.S., the Other Side); their devotion to each other's survival, and their natural ability to see beyond the ubiquitous trash, disease, and poverty to delight in the beauty of their local environment.

Of course every kid who has ever encountered fireflies (even the fake ones at the beginning of the old Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland) knows they're magic. While it's hard to imagine fireflies ever providing much in the way of useful illumination, this passage in the book is especially poignant because it shows how Reyna and her siblings take advantage of anything they can, including free light (luz libre) from fireflies, to feed body and soul.

For me this passage is as much a testament to the nature of light and beauty as fundamental requirements for life – and survival – as any I've seen recently.