Additional information
by Yvonne Martinez (Author)
"Someday Mija, You'll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman is a memoir that turns time on its head, circling through terror and joy with eloquence and becoming its own sacrament of resistance." --Foreword Reviews, 5-star review
At eighteen, Yvonne Martinez flees brutal domestic violence and is taken in by her dying grandmother . . . who used to be a sex worker. Before she dies, her grandmother reveals family secrets and shares her uncommon wisdom. "Someday, Mija," she tells Yvonne, "you'll learn the difference between a whore and a working woman." She also shares disturbing facts about their family's history--eventually leading Yvonne to discover that her grandmother was trafficked as a child in Depression-era Utah by her own mother, Yvonne's great-grandmother, and that she was blamed for her own rape. In the years that follow her grandmother's passing, Yvonne gets an education and starts a family. As she heals from her own abuse by her mother and stepfather, she becomes an advocate/labor activist. Grounded in her grandmother's dictum not to whore herself out, she learns to fight for herself and teaches others to do the same--exposing sexual harassment in the labor unions where she works and fighting corruption. Intense but ultimately uplifting, Someday Mija, You'll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman is a compelling memoir in essays of transforming transgenerational trauma into resilience and post-traumatic growth.Author Biography
Yvonne Martinez is a retired labor negotiator/organizer. She has been published by ZyZZyVa, Crab Orchard Review, Labor Notes, and NPR. She also formerly wrote a local labor blog in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her memoir in essays, Someday Mija, You'll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman was endorsed by Shondaland and covers her childhood in Salt Lake City/South Central LA/Boyle Heights and her work as a labor negotiator/organizer in California and the Pacific Northwest. Her new book Scabmuggers is based on her experience as a National Fellow of the Harvard Trade Union Program in 1994. Yvonne lives in Berkeley, CA.
