Our September 2026 Open Secrets Book Club pick is memoir in essays Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures by Marianna Marlowe. You can get a taste of the book by reading Marianna’s essay, “Why My Friend’s Reaction to My Bracelet Charm Filled Me with Shame,” which is excerpted from Portrait of a Mestiza.
Join us in the Open Secrets Magazine chat to discuss the book, and for a Q&A with Marianna on Thursday, October 1 at 8:30 p.m. ET on Substack Live, which you can watch in the Substack app or on desktop. Click here for a reminder; Open Secrets subscribers will be notified when we go live. Please bring your own questions for Marianna, which we will ask as time permits. The discussion will be recorded and posted for anyone who can’t attend live.
Below you’ll find a personal note from Marianna Marlowe, purchase links for the book, which you can also check out or request at your local library, and more info about what to expect.
A Note from Marianna Marlowe
I began writing memoir at fifty, an age when many women are taught to accept invisibility by silencing themselves. Instead, I found my voice.
My first book, Portrait of a Feminist, traced the evolution of my feminism. But feminism, I discovered, was only one strand in a far more complicated inheritance. Identity is never singular, and mine has been shaped by race, class, citizenship, and religion, as well as migration, marriage, and motherhood.
In Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures, I turn toward the fault lines that run beneath those identities. Raised by a Peruvian mother living in a kind of exile in California, married into a Syrian family wary of my Americanness and my lapsed Catholicism, I inhabit the borderlands that scholar/activist Gloria Anzaldúa named—the in-between spaces where cultures meet, collide, and reshape one another.
This memoir asks: What does it mean to inherit both pride and shame? To raise mixed-race sons when you once longed for daughters? To move between languages and loyalties without feeling fully claimed by any of them?
Dedicated to Anzaldúa, Portrait of a Mestiza brings mestiza consciousness to life—not as abstract theory, but as lived experience. With this book I invite readers to explore with me the possibility of a world beyond prejudice and exploitation: a place of courage, openness, and potential, where division transforms into connection.
Where to buy Portrait of a Mestiza
Ebook
About Portrait of a Mestiza
We are all shaped by the cultures that surround us—their expectations, ideals, and norms. But what happens when those cultures collide? When your mother embodies one world and your father another?
In this profoundly personal follow-up to Portrait of a Feminist, Marianna Marlowe explores the intersections of race, class, and gender as they are molded by family, religion, and migration. Born to a Peruvian mother and an American father, Marlowe’s early life spanned continents—from the Philippines to Ecuador, Brazil to the United States—leaving her with a sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. Through a series of thematically linked essays, she reflects on the complexities of identity, the fluidity of culture, and the enduring search for home.
Now raising two sons with her Syrian Muslim husband, Marlowe continues to navigate the ever-shifting landscapes of culture, language, and faith. Inspired by scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands, Portrait of a Mestiza is both a meditation on life lived in the “in-between” spaces and a call to dismantle the binaries that divide us. Thought-provoking and deeply relevant, this collection urges us to embrace hybridity, challenge inherited limitations, and create for ourselves more ethical and expansive lives.
About Marianna Marlowe
Marianna Marlowe is the author of Portrait of a Feminist: A Memoir in Essays (February 2025) and Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures (May 2026), memoirs tracing the evolving intersections of feminism, culture, and belonging.
Just requested this for purchase from the Boston Public Library! As an ESL/bilingual Spanish teacher, this is right up my alley! <3
I could not be more excited. Looking forward to this book and author. We Latinas have to support great Latinx 📚 and art.