During her two-decade career as a full-time labor organizer and negotiator in California and the Pacific Northwest, Yvonne Martinez managed to squeeze in an hour, maybe two, every day to write her debut memoir, Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman, out Oct. 18 from She Writes Press. About multigenerational personal and political trauma and resilience, Martinez's memoir is made up of 30 essays and covers the author’s harrowing childhood as well as her coming-of-age story.


At age 18, Martinez, a Mexican American, fled domestic violence at the hands of her mother and stepfather and moved in with her dying grandmother, who would reveal disturbing facts about their family’s history. One fact uncovered was that her grandmother was trafficked as a child in Depression-era Utah and blamed for her own rape. Before her death, Martinez’s grandmother told her grandchild, “Someday, Mija, you’ll learn the difference between a whore and a working woman.”


Determined to take her grandmother’s advice and to not sell herself short, Martinez obtained an education and started a family. Along the way, she also learned to fight for herself while teaching others to do the same. Additionally, Martinez exposed sexual harassment and corruption in the labor unions where she worked. “The essays started with questions I dared to ask,” Martinez says, “like ‘What really happened to my grandmother?’ and led to a search for answers that, once started, did not stop until I got to this point in the stories.”


It took Martinez 25 years to write her memoir, which illustrates that trauma, once revealed, can be transformative. “The shared trauma of racism/sexism was not distinct, one from the other,” Martinez says. “Delving into painful events was like a clearinghouse of contracted (as in a body holding it in) and psychic (unseen) trauma that not only cleared away but explained or provided insight into what happened. Nothing was lost.”


Martinez says that while she was writing the memoir, “a path to freedom emerged.” Ultimately, the decades-long project proved cathartic. In the book’s short afterword, Martinez writes, “As an organizer/activist, writing these essays and doing the work to unlock the trauma, I found that hidden sources of resistance and resilience were unlocked too. I posit that trauma and resistance, like a double helix, are bound together and are both passed down. That a healing journey unlocks both.”


Telling her story in essay form was a matter of expedience, Martinez says. “The essays seemed to both complete themselves and set up new essays. Finally, as the direction of inquiry became clearer, the essays revealed some answers and more questions.”


While answering the difficult questions that arose during writing was not easy, Martinez says that finding “time to dedicate to the page at first” was the most difficult part of writing Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman. “As the full scope of the story began to reveal itself,” she says, “it was a matter of overcoming the emotional ‘Billy Goats Gruff’ troll at the gate to get to the insights and healing.”


Martinez cites Tara Westover (Educated), Trevor Noah (Born a Crime), and Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend) as among the authors who gave her inspiration while writing her memoir. “In her brave book Educated, Westover found a way out of no way through education and healing,” Martinez says. “Her survivalist family was a subset of Mormonism. My family was a Mexican/Catholic minority under Mormonism. The power of overarching patriarchal structures made an escape from its abuses nearly impossible. She was able to, through education.”


Martinez partnered with She Writes Press, a hybrid publisher, to publish Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman. “What I appreciate about She Writes Press is the ‘behind the curtain’ break down of the publishing business,” Martinez says. “It saved me from a fool’s errand in search of a ‘traditional’ publisher. Not only that, it provides the network and resources to get a professionally produced book to market.”