Program Description
Event Details
Jean Guerrero is the author of CRUX: A Cross-Border Memoir, winner of the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers prize. She is an Emmy-winning investigative immigration reporter for KPBS in San Diego; she contributes to NPR, PBS, PRI’s The World and other public media. Months before Trump’s family separations captured national attention, her reporting about the practice was cited by a Congressional inquiry. She started her career at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires as a correspondent in Mexico City, trekking through mountains with coffee smugglers, opium poppy producers and maize farmers across Latin America. She was named “Latina Journalist on the Rise” from one of the 15 most influential Latina journalists in Southern California by CCNMA. The San Diego City Beat picked her as one of San Diego’s “Best People.” In her spare time, she surfs and rides horses.
In this lyrical, haunting memoir, Jean Guerrero tries to locate the border between truth and fantasy as she searches for explanations for her father’s behavior. Refusing to accept an alleged schizophrenia diagnosis at face value, she takes Marco Antonio’s dark paranoia seriously and investigates all his wildest claims. She crisscrosses the Mexican-American border to unearth the stories of cousins and grandparents and discovers a chain of fabulists and mystics in her lineage, going back to her great-great-grandmother, a clairvoyant curandera who was paid to summon spirits from the afterlife. As she delves deeper and deeper into her family’s shadowy past, Jean begins mirroring her father’s self-destructive behavior. She risks death on her adventures, imperiling everything in her journey to redeem her father from the underworld of his delusions.
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The Library Shop will be onsite to sell copies of Crux to support the San Diego Public Library Foundation.