Someday Mija, You'll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman: A Memoir

“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.

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.