Crossing Borders: A Review of Michel Stone's The Iguana Tree

Will Donnelly

Michel Stone, The Iguana Tree.
           Hub City Press, 2012. Hardcover, 220 pp, $24.95.


       It’s not easy to write from a cultural perspective that’s different from one’s own. To do so respectfully, any author must not only perform deep research, but must also be certain to treat all of her characters as completely human. Michel Stone does these things quite well in The Iguana Tree, a novel about the present-day Mexican-American immigrant experience. 
       Given the subject matter, The Iguana Tree is certainly timely, but it’s also surprisingly harrowing. Moving from one country to another is never easy, and doing so under duress and with so much sacrifice is downright frightening. 
       This is the story of Lilia and Héctor and their baby daughter Alejandra. It falls to Héctor to make it to the United States in order to make a better life for his family. He has the opportunity to travel to South Carolina and work on a small farm. The couple that owns the farm, Elizabeth and Lucas, treat Héctor and his companions with dignity, though the threat of deportation always looms from others. The most tragic aspect of this journey, however, is that it breaks his family apart, at least for a time. Lilia and Alejandra must stay behind in the small town of Puerto Isadore. When Lilia decides to reunite their family, the real tragedy begins, as it most certainly has for so many real families trying to make a better life for themselves in the United States. 
       While not based on any single true story, Michel Stone spoke with numerous Mexican and Mexican-American immigrants about their experiences crossing the border and incorporated many of their tribulations into this narrative. A simpler novel might address issues of racism and the political difficulties that come with a lack of proper documentation, but The Iguana Tree goes further. Those issues are present here as well, but the greatest danger facing Héctor, Lilia, and Alejandra turns out to be the dangerous and disorganized process of crossing itself. So many Americans today have seen the footage on the news of people climbing fences or wading through the Rio Grande, but the reality for many seeking a better life is much more treacherous. 
       Stone’s handling of Héctor’s and Lilia’s perspectives in various chapters is masterful, and each section tells us something more about them. It is via Lilia that we encounter the eponymous tree in Puerto Isadore, and her observation of a broken iguana egg is foreboding:

       She considered the egg’s innards, long gone, once swelling from liquid 
       into a living creature inside the opaque shell, life coming from life, 
       something substantial from something less. Perhaps one of the yellow-
       headed black-birds…had drunk the slick insides. If so, the egg would 
       never become an iguana, would never become what the mother iguana 
       set out for it to be…The bird—careless, distracted, and indifferent—soon 
       flying off to other trees, other courtyards.  
    
       Indeed, Lilia’s family is often at the whim of outside forces in this novel, and the life that Héctor and Lilia desire for their child and for themselves hangs constantly in the balance.  
       We often forget that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Even the American Indians who had been here so many centuries before Columbus arrived were then hoarded away from their homelands and into small communities, if they survived at all, and the myriad African slaves, while not leaving their homeland of their own volition, were forced to immigrate here as well. The Iguana Treereminds us all of this shared experience, how dangerous it is and always has been, and how much sacrifice has been required to make a nation as diverse and beautiful as the United States is today.