Susan Mills is the author of On the Wings of a Hummingbird, a novel about a teenager named Petra who travels from her small Guatemalan village to the U-S, fleeing gang violence. Before writing the book, Mills was an immigration attorney for twenty years, and has prepared thousands of asylum cases for Central American immigrants. The Public’s Radio Community Producer Pearl Marvell spoke with the author about the book, and how Mills’ experience as an attorney informed her work.
For more information on Susan Mills, go to susanmills.co. She also has two upcoming book signing events in Providence: one at the Sprout CoWorking Space on Sept. 29 from 6 to 8 p.m., and another at Books on the Square in Wayland Square on Oct. 18 at 6 p.m.
Pearl Marvell: Susan, thank you for sitting down with me today to talk about your book and what inspired it.
Susan Mills: Thank you. It’s so exciting to be here, Pearl.
Marvell: Can you tell us – without giving away too much of the book – obviously, it’s about this girl named Petra. What else is it about?
Mills: Petra is a complex young woman sorting through her moral universe, trying to find her way toward a meaningful future, despite having suffered the loss of her family, her mother, and her two best friends, and despite finding that she and her family are very much in danger. Petra is aware that she starts with many disadvantages, but is inspired by her Mayan ancestry and her grandfather’s myth-telling to help her find her way to something good and meaningful. My hope in On the Wings of a Hummingbird more than anything else is just to convey that immigrants are complex human beings with their own hopes and dreams, their obstacles and struggles, with complicated paths – to make it clear that immigration issues don’t define people as individuals. Very few people, Petra among them, leave their homes, their culture, language, family roots without feeling like they don’t have a choice.
Marvell: And so in your work as a lawyer, you focused a lot on unaccompanied minor cases. Was there a particular case that made you want to do this?
Mills: There was a very specific immigration client that first inspired Petra. Her case was not particularly remarkable, but she had a fiery spirit that really struck me. And her background, at 15 years old – which coincidentally is the same age that Petra is in the book – she simply up and left Guatemala for the U.S. all by herself, without telling anyone. She didn’t tell her grandparents that she lived with there, nor her mother here in the U.S. Her father had already abandoned her. She got across the border, found her mother, made her way to our office. She applied for special immigrant juvenile status, and I really liked her a lot. So she birthed Petra. But honestly, as the novel grew, she became a smaller influence. There were so many kids who had been abused by a parent or a boyfriend whose father had abused their mother, who were scared because the gangs were recruiting them. Each kid had their own story. And mostly Petra is made up out of my head and from all these different Central Americans that I’ve known – all the stories that have churned around in my life through my emotions for the majority of my life, including my son’s father and his family. And, of course, there’s a lot of myself in her, as well.
Marvell: And you are donating a portion of the proceeds of this book to KIND, Kids in Need of Defense. Why was this important for you to do, and how can people donate?
Mills: KIND is a very large organization based in D.C. They have a branch in Boston, which is the lawyers branch. And they’re very much experts in the field of special immigrant juvenile unaccompanied minors, the law around that. So we often were in touch with them with particularly complex legal issues, and they were very helpful. They’re incredibly good at what they do and very dedicated. And I, you know, as somebody with a social change background, social justice background, I really wanted to give back a portion of the proceeds. You can certainly go to my website at www.susanmills.co and donate there.
Marvell: What would you like to see change in the future in regards to immigration?
Mills: Right, that’s a question that I often get asked, it seems that you write about immigration, and then you have to write about it. No, I think that novels, the beauty of novels is that you get to pose lots of questions. And it’s actually better if you don’t answer the question race, and the reader gets to figure it out. But anyway, I’ll do my best. If I think that if I was emperor of the world, I would open borders as they used to be during earlier historical eras. With the world becoming flat, as they say, and trading goods and information so widespread, it seems to me that ultimately, it’s just a losing battle to think we can regulate the flow of humanity. On the other hand, that would cause for sure incredible disruption. More practically, I’d just like to see us think about what would really be good for the U.S. – making work visas more rational, for instance; reduce waiting times for family members to join loved ones in the U.S.; and probably change the definitions required to qualify for refugee or asylum status. Right now, a person can prove that they’ll be killed if they return to the country. But if the reason doesn’t fall into one of the neat statutory categories, they’ll be denied. People and attorneys are constantly forced to twist the facts of their lives to fit into one of those categories. People fleeing gangs is a good example of an often deathly fear of return, which doesn’t neatly fit into persecution on the basis of political opinion or membership in a particular social group. And then, I guess just most importantly, is to find a way to treat people like human beings.
