A very interesting insight. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book.

This book was insightful into the treatment of Mexican Americans in Mormon Utah. Unfortunately I had trouble with the writing style and couldnt stay interested to really learn about it.

For me, this was an interesting insight into another culture and a tough read in places. Yvonne Martinez has dug deep within her family to produce this work of memoir and I truly hope she found some peace through the process.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
This book is pretty fascinating. The treatment of Mexicans in Mormon dominant Utah was awful. The author does a good job of weaving her family's history together.

A powerful and reflective book of growing up and family dynamics. The history and repercussions of racial prejudice and the effects on her family life.
Being able to graduate college and career progression was fascinating, not a traditional route but one who uses life to inform choices and makes it work.
No judgement but admiration for the career and sticking power.

This is an intensely powerful memoir; Martinez’s life is a scar tissue of intergenerational wounds. Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman is a serious treatment of what the traumas of racial violence, poverty, and sexual exploitation can do to a child and a family, and how Yvonne was able to weave these histories — her own, her mother’s, her grandmother’s, her family’s and her community’s — into a lifetime of “doing better.” This is not a memoir to be undertaken lightly.

Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman is divided into two halves, the first reads like a novel and documents Martinez’s experiences as a child and growing up in a dysfunctional family. The second half addresses Yvonne’s life afterward, as an adult and specifically as an activist in the service of her community, as an organizer, and educator.

The two halves are intertwined: it is Martinez’s experiences growing up in an abusive and violent home that shapes her ability to understand the traumas that envelop her community. This shared experience is one not easily addressed by public health programs or the simple piling on of more and more education. Oppressive systems stemming from cultures steeped in patriarchy, sexual violence, and colonization cannot be wiped away, even replaced that easily. These cultures exist within even larger systems of oppression.

In Martinez’s case, however, these experiences also spurred them to take on systemic racism, sexism, violence, and poverty as institutions to be dismantled. This is a case of an individual working from within, for one’s own community (and for all communities). Change must be internal as well as external for it to sustain; Martinez’s life is proof of that.

A profound and consuming memoir that is in equal parts disturbing, saddening, and inspiring.

Thank you NetGalley for the eARC. I fully enjoyed this book. I loved each moment of it. I could totally relate to this girl and how she grew up and her family members , having to go to the neighbors to call the cops, all of it. a must read