Motherland: The Disintegration of a Family in a Collapsed Venezuela

Journalist Ramón debuts with a sobering chronicle of her family’s struggles in Venezuela as its economy fluctuated during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Her Spanish father, a businessman who survived German concentration camps during WWII, immigrated to Venezuela in the late 1940s. He met Ramón’s mother, a former teacher, in the 1970s, and the pair married and began a family in Maracaibo, the center of Venezuala’s oil industry. Ramón was born in 1981 and recalls a period of national optimism and personal prosperity through the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez. At first, Ramón’s parents embraced Chávez’s populist presidency; then Ramón’s father died, and her mother was left to care for Ramón and her brothers as Venezuela’s social safety net began to collapse in the 2000s as a result of Chávez’s shaky economic gambits. Eventually, Ramón and her brothers fled the country, leaving their mother behind—Ramón would return annually and observe that “the country I’d grown up in no longer existed.” The author writes wrenchingly of her mother’s struggles to provide for her and her siblings while their neighborhood deteriorated around them, and catalogs Venezuela’s political troubles with rigor and concision. It’s a fascinating and devastating account of one family’s fate amid a national crisis. (Oct.)