Making an American Family: A Recipe in Five Generations, the progressive story of one family is told through five generations, beginning with their journey into the United States during the Mexican Revolution, and culminating with their posterity, attending school online during the COVID19 pandemic. A family memoir, told through a chorus of voices, invites the reader into the multi-sensorial experience of memory and story.

At first glance, Rodriguez’s family memoir is a unique culinary journey, chronicling the growth and development of one family through five generations, from Mexico at the turn of the Twentieth Century to present-day United States. In narratives that begin with childhood, family members remember their formative experiences in chorus, highlighted by the foods that sustained, encouraged, and held their families together. Upon closer examination, the family memoir is a picture of erasure and homogenization through generations, as illustrated by the faded pictures in the cover. Rodriguez is faithful to show how her immigrant family, like most families who came from Mexico in the early 20th century, were systematically stripped of their language, heritage, culture, and their given names, all for the price of “becoming American” in the USA. With passion and precision, Rodriguez serves the reader a family feast of memories, a microcosm of the American family.

Janet Rodriguez is an author, teacher, and editor living in Northern California. In the United States, her work has appeared in Hobart, Pangyrus, Eclectica, The Rumpus, Cloud Women’s Quarterly, American River Review, and Calaveras Station. She is the winner of the Bazanella Literary Award for Short Fiction and the Literary Insight for Work in Translation Award, both from CSUS Sacramento in 2017. Rodriguez has also co-authored two memoirs, published in South Africa. Her short stories, essays, and poetry usually deal with themes involving morality in faith communities and the mixed-race experience in a culturally binary world. She holds an MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Editor of Interviews at The Rumpus.