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Désirée Zamorano’s Powerful Novel ‘Dispossessed’ Reflects on Immigration, Identity, and Historical Trauma

In Dispossessed, Désirée Zamorano tackles a harrowing chapter of American history—the mass expulsion of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals during the Great Depression. Drawing from her experience teaching diversity, equity, and inclusion at California State University Long Beach, Zamorano felt compelled to write a novel addressing the erasure of these stories.

The novel follows Manuel Galvan, a young boy separated from his family during the 1930s deportation campaign. This moment saw over one million people, including U.S. citizens, forcibly removed from the country. Through Manuel’s lifelong search to reunite with his family, Zamorano explores themes of systemic injustice, racial scapegoating, and the ongoing struggle for identity that continues to affect Mexican Americans today. The novel’s release coincided with troubling political developments, including family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, which only heightened the urgency of her message. “The timeliness of this novel is deeply painful to me,” Zamorano tells Modern Muze. She emphasizes how history’s injustices continue echoing in the present.

Photo Credit: Desiree Zamorano

In an exclusive interview, Zamorano shares how Dispossessed was born as a response to the lack of representation and historical understanding of the lives of immigrants, family separation, and themes that are still present today.

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What inspired you to write Dispossessed, and how does it connect to the current socio-political climate regarding immigration and family separation?

Since 2014, I have taught Linguistic and Cultural Diversity to future elementary teachers. Or diversity, equity, and inclusion ( a term that is oddly vilified) at California State University Long Beach. Each semester, I teach the forgotten histories of multiple marginalized groups. And each semester, when my students learn for the first time that one million people were pushed out of this country, including an estimated 400,000 US citizens, they are astounded and aghast.

For years, I had been baffled that there [was] not a novel out that addressed these issues. And I kept waiting to read that novel. Year after year I would teach this. The expatriation of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals, until in 2018, I finally realized that would have to write that novel. The writer I had been waiting for was me.

A few months after sitting down and starting the first draft, our country began separating families at the border. The timeliness of this novel was deeply painful to me. It is painful today. During the release of Dispossessed in September, multiple Republican candidates continued vilifying immigrants, the undocumented, legal immigrants, as well as naturalized citizens. Project 2025 actually proposes to denaturalize citizens, and I am certain they don’t mean my British-born husband or the Slovenian-born former first lady.

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From the beginning of our nation, we’ve always had absurd “immigration policies.” Native Americans were labeled “domestic foreigners” and didn’t have the right to vote until 1924. The Supreme Court, in 1923, ruled “the intention of the Founding Fathers was to ‘confer the privilege of citizenship upon the class of persons they knew as White.’” Citizenship and whiteness remain linked in the minds of many of us. Particularly policymakers, which is why there’s a wall on the southern border and not the northern (while, in fact, Canadians, more than any other nationality, overstay their visas.) Few worry about a “mass invasion” from the north. This is all about skin color.


Can you share more about Manuel Galvan’s journey in Dispossessed and how his experiences reflect broader themes of injustice in Mexican American history?

Manuel is separated from his family, then his sister, during the mass expulsion of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals in the 1930s. This is a result of Herbert Hoover wanting to remain president during the Depression and his cabinet deciding to scapegoat Mexicans. This is a recurring theme in our country, as you may have noticed. The novel ends as Proposition 187 is ratified by the majority of Californians in 1994. Among other things, that proposition would have made it illegal to educate the undocumented. (The Wikipedia entry on this proposition refuses to allow the term “undocumented” and insists on “illegal aliens.”) The proposition was ultimately struck down.

Manuel spends his life in search of his family of origin. For Mexican Americans, I feel,  there is always this sense of displacement, of finding our footing in this simplistically Black and white world, on claiming our dignity.  In writing the book, I drew directly from Los Angeles history, our American history. That so few people know about our American history is what compelled and insisted that I write this book. Alongside the displacement in this story, the medical malpractice, and the being pushed out of education, there is dignity and hope.


How does your background and upbringing in Los Angeles influence your storytelling and the themes you explore in your work?


From a young age, I felt my demographic was invisible, and I continue to be particularly enraged by the dominant culture’s and Hollywood’s pervasive misrepresentations. Because the women I knew in my life were never portrayed in the media, I wrote a novel all about them. The Amado Women will be re-released in 2025. Our portrayals have changed a bit, but certainly not in keeping with our numbers in this county. Most of what I write is to RE present my demographic, to show ourselves in all our breadth, depth, and complexity.


What message do you hope readers take away from Dispossessed, especially in light of the historical events it addresses?


As I hinted at earlier, scapegoating Mexicans has been playing out for decades. Understanding our unvarnished history forces us to face our present. Dangerous slander and scapegoating continue to this day; nativism is colored by white racial identity politics. The message: THIS HAPPENED. And this is the impact on one life. Project 2025 threatens to rip 20 million people out of the fabric of US life. Will you, the reader, allow it to ever happen again?


In what ways do you think literature can play a role in bringing attention to marginalized histories, and what do you hope to achieve with your writing?

When I throw out numbers like one million or 400, 000, people’s brains are not built to understand the enormity. Like the saying, “one million deaths is a statistic, one death a tragedy” I attempted to write this story in a comprehensible, human scale. One small boy, the journey of his life. How was his life impacted by the government-borne injustice?

Literature, and I hope my writing, brings these stories vividly to life in the minds of the readers.

Dispossessed is now available for sale here.

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