We Are Not from Here
We Are Not from Here
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Jenny Torres Sanchez on We Are Not from Here
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The faces she couldn’t leave behindThe book began with news coverage of children crossing Central America alone, and Torres Sanchez’s own family background made the distance between reader and subject collapse entirely. Her parents immigrated from Guatemala and El Salvador, which meant the reports were never abstract.
It was so heartbreaking to hear about such vulnerable lives being put at so much risk. My parents are from Central America; I myself am a mother — so it hit hard and it hurt.
Before becoming this book, the story had already been rejected by a previous editor. Torres Sanchez set it aside and wrote something else. The idea refused to stay shelved.
This story kept coming back to me in bits and pieces, in all these different voices. It kept reminding me it was there and needed to be told.
Torres Sanchez’s mother grew up in Puerto Barrios, the Guatemalan town where the novel opens, and childhood visits left her with specific sensory memories of the place: the store across the road, trips to Río Dulce. Learning what violence had since done to that same landscape collapsed those memories into something darker. Pulga is the novel’s teenage narrator making the journey north.
Pulga says every beautiful thing turns black in his world, and that’s sort of how I feel in knowing what’s happening to that beautiful place that lives in my memory.
Even with the family connection and the returning idea, Torres Sanchez points to a single, concrete reason the book finally got written.
Hearing the stories of children making this dangerous trip by themselves, seeing their faces, hearing their voices. I couldn’t get their faces and voices out of my mind, or my heart. They are why I wrote this story.
How she wrote it
Filling the gaps without taking the trainThe central research problem was one Torres Sanchez named directly: she could not ride La Bestia, the freight train migrants cling to across Mexico, herself. Everything she wrote about that journey had to be built from other people’s accounts of it.
I wondered how I could tell this story when I couldn’t get on that train. So I had to work at filling in the gaps without having the ability to actually experience everything I was writing about.
Her solution was to go deep into the journalism that had accompanied her. She named her sources with precision, including Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, drawn from Luiselli’s intake interviews with migrant children, and the work of Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez, who rode La Bestia repeatedly to report it.
I read a lot of nonfiction about La Bestia, especially a book called *The Beast* by Óscar Martínez, a journalist who took the trip many times, risking his life. He also wrote a book called *A History of Violence* — I relied a lot on that kind of journalism. Then there is Valeria Luiselli’s book *Tell Me How It Ends*, which is heartbreaking. She did intake for migrant children, so she wrote down the stories they told her about why they had to leave their countries.
The novel’s three narrators, Pulga, Pequeña, and Chico, were not invented quickly. Pequeña in particular had surfaced in earlier, unfinished work without ever finding her story. Torres Sanchez describes recognizing, when she finally matched character to subject, that the fit had been waiting all along.
Versions of these characters have been with me forever, before I even began writing this book.
The book Torres Sanchez started was not the book she finished. She had planned four narrative voices; one was cut because his arc never had room to develop. She and her editor, Liza Kaplan, also removed vignettes she had written in other voices, fragments representing the many people whose stories run alongside the main characters on the route north.
There are so many stories on a journey like this and it’s hard to let go of some of them, to not feel the pressure of telling all the stories. For that reason, and many more, writing this book was very emotional for me.
The anxiety about getting it right did not fade as the draft progressed. But Torres Sanchez came to see that anxiety as a tool rather than an obstacle, something that kept her from moving too fast through scenes that deserved slow attention.
As I wrote, I worried a lot if I could do it justice. But that worry was necessary, you know what I mean? It made me pay close attention to every single scene, every single sentence. It made me very aware that this story needed to be told with care and love, in a way that allows the truth of the situation to be understood while also honoring the characters.
The personal thread
What her parents’ silence left her to findTorres Sanchez did not grow up with open family conversations about what her parents had survived. Her mother emigrated from Guatemala alone at seventeen; her father left El Salvador alone at nineteen. The silence around those experiences shaped what she believed Latinx young readers needed from fiction.
I think it’s particularly important for Latinx young adults to see these topics represented because many times trauma, depression, grief, dysfunction, are not openly discussed in Latinx households. It wasn’t in mine... My parents had rough childhoods, and then suffered the hardships of immigration alone as young adults (my mother emigrated to the United States alone from Guatemala at seventeen years old, my father alone from El Salvador at nineteen).
Being a Latinx writer did not dissolve the fear of misrepresentation; it sharpened it. Torres Sanchez wanted readers from within the community to recognize themselves, and she wanted readers from outside it to be changed by what they found. She also made an explicit choice about how to handle violence in the narrative.
I do worry, even being a Latinx writer, that I’m doing as much justice to the story as I possibly can. I wanted to do right by my characters and by my community. I wanted to make them proud, and I wanted them to say, ‘Yes, that’s our story.’ I wrote with a lot of care and a lot of love. I couldn’t shy away from violence, and I couldn’t sugarcoat it. But I didn’t want it to be gratuitous or sensationalized.
What she wants us to sit with
Bearing witness, then carrying it forwardBefore publication, when the book was still called In Exile, Torres Sanchez described what she was trying to hold together: the brutality of the journey and the refusal of its characters to stop hoping. She wanted both things to remain true at once.
It’s a book about journeys and survival and the truth of many Central American teens. It’s about hope and refusing to give up. It’s about being breaking apart and trying to stay whole. It’s gut-wrenching and hopeful and I hope it sheds light on the dark reality of many migrants seeking refuge right now.
Torres Sanchez has been specific about what she means by understanding the migrant experience: not just the danger of the route, but the cost of the decision to leave. She wants readers to feel the weight of what is surrendered before anyone steps onto a train.
A deeper understanding of who migrants are and why they leave their home countries. I wanted to show that it’s a difficult decision, one many migrants don’t want to make and usually only make when their lives are at risk. There’s not enough appreciation for how difficult it is to leave. How heartbreaking it is to extract yourself from your home and all you love. I wanted that to come through. I want the reader to understand the whole journey, where it really starts and why.
For readers who share something with Pulga, Pequeña, and Chico, Torres Sanchez wants the book to function as recognition. For readers who do not, she wants it to produce something that outlasts the final page.
I hope *We Are Not from Here* fosters discussion about human rights, humanity, immigration, and our responsibility to one another. I hope readers see it is a form of bearing witness. I hope those who identify with Pulga, Pequeña, and Chico see it as an acknowledgement of their pain and struggle. And for those who don’t identify with these characters, I hope it fosters empathy in them.
That phrase, ‘bearing witness,’ is doing specific work. The book is not asking readers to solve a policy problem by the last page. It is asking them to have genuinely seen something, and to carry what they saw into the decisions they make as adults.