I usually try to get to an event or two at the annual Concord Festival of Authors, and one year I ended up attending readings by new novelists held at Kerem Shalom temple.
Iris Gomez, an immigration lawyer, was one of them, and I bought her novel Try to Remember. The protagonist’s Puerto Rican/Columbian childhood in Miami was fascinating, but hard for me to relate to. Why, for example, would the family not seek help for a clearly deranged parent? Painful to observe.
I passed the book along to a colleague from the Dominican Republic, who immediately got what Gomez was trying to convey. She said, “Omigosh! This is the story of my life.” When the Latino employee group was looking for speakers, Gomez was chosen to join WBUR radio’s “Con Salsa” host José Massó for a lunchtime presentation.
It was interesting to learn about Gomez’s other life, as an immigration lawyer, and to hear her describe the duality of the immigrant experience. She grew up trying to bridge her family’s world and that of the new country. Today she bridges the worlds of novelist and a lawyer, in both cases trying to build understanding.
From the website at her day job: “Iris Gomez joined [Massachusetts Law Reform Institute] as an immigration attorney in March 1992, is a nationally-recognized expert on asylum and immigration law, and directs MLRI’s Immigrants Protection Project. Prior to joining MLRI, she was a Senior Attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. She also worked as a law school lecturer, a public defender, a farm worker lawyer, and has been the Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Immigration Law Center. She graduated from Boston University School of Law.”
José Massó was a dynamic and entertaining speaker. With both humor and seriousness, he told us about his culture shock coming from Puerto Rico to a supposedly liberal college on the mainland and about how he developed his concept of a third way for immigrants, one that takes from the two cultures but makes something new.
Photograph of José Massó: WBUR
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