Review: A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review 

A group of fierce grandmothers formed the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen infants and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them. 

A Flower Traveled in my Blood is an historical and emotional account of how the dictatorships, juntas, and upheavals in 1970s Argentina lead to forty years of searching for disappeared family members and fighting for justice. Written by journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland, it takes into account historical documents and first hand accounting from people who lived it. When I started this, I thought the focus was going on to be solely on the group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, but so that the reader gets a full understanding, Gilliland gives a full accounting and goes through the timeline of political events that lead to the forming of the Abuelas and the political atmosphere affecting their lives. It gives a fuller picture but also felt too scattered at times, it seemed like the story didn't know what it wanted to focus on. If you know nothing of the history of Argentina at this time, you might appreciate the context but others not looking for a full complete history lesson and more of a singular focus on the Abuelas, may get lost in all the historical players. 

The armed men who now roved the city as agents of the dictatorship were at once secretive— driving cars without license plates and obscuring their faces with women’s stockings— and brazen, abducting people off the street in broad daylight. 

While the story lays out the historical events and details about the Abuelas, it also has a solid backbone taking the reader through the timeline by following the Roisinblit family. Rosa was one of the founders of the Abuelas and came into it by searching for her daughter, Patricia. Patricia was earlier on politically active with her partner, Jose, but then had a daughter and was pregnant again, trying to stay off the radar. She was taken, her young daughter left, Rosa ends up taking care of her, and thus begins Rosa's search for her. With the government unstable, and others searching for the desaparecidos, we see how out of necessity Rosa and the other older women, join together to try and find their children. So, while we travel through the timeline of historical events starting in the 1970s, El Proceso (National Reorganization Process), Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, Noche de los Lápices (Night of the Pencils), Operation Condor, etc, we also follow the forming of the Abuelas and some of Patricia's, her children, and Rosa's journey. 

While the armed forces claimed to be targeting “terrorists,” they employed a conveniently loose definition of what that meant. In their crosshairs were not only militants but those on the further peripheries of the left. Students. Artists. Journalists. Union leaders. Lawyers who defended unions. Musicians. Poets. Priests who ministered to the poor. Nuns who helped desperate families looking for their missing relatives. In the eyes of the dictatorship, they were all “subversives.” 

The small beginning of the Abuelas to the organization it grew to was emotional and inspiring. There were the bonds of grief, the infighting from growing pains, the danger from the government and their infiltrators, and their sheer determination to never forget their children. When they start to get help from outside organizations, like the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, CLAMOR (Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in the Countries of the Southern Cone), and eventually an American scientist Mary-Claire King, you'll start to feel the power and achievement of collective power. 

The junta had tried to make thousands of people disappear, and to erase the identities of their children. But mtDNA was like an indelible ID tag that every mother seals in her children’s cells. What the Abuelas needed to find their grandchildren was already within them. In their blood, just as in Gelman’s poem, traveled a hardy flower, the mitochondrial DNA that contained the story of every mother that had come before them, and every child they had borne—no matter where in the world they had been taken. 

The later second half focused on the search for the grandchildren of the missing Abuela's children and how DNA research was the hope they were looking for. An important aspect I liked being touched on was how this didn't just devastate the Abuela's lives but the easy answer of finding DNA matches wasn't easy at all. The grandchildren ranks were full of children who had no idea about their origins, sometimes not wanting to know and others feeling torn up about feeling like they were betraying their adoptive parents by getting to know their biological families. Rosa's family thread continues as they find Patricia's child she was pregnant with when she was taken and he talks about how learning his true origins shredded his life. Injustices like this never happen in a vacuum and I'm glad the generational reverberations were shown. 

“It was an honor to scream when everybody else held silence,” 

There were at times I thought the organization of the storytelling felt too scattered but if you don't mind a pretty thorough relaying of the political historical events of the time, the eye-opening and emotional journey is worth it. The Roisinblit family doesn't get a full happy ending, no such thing exists in circumstances like this, but you'll learn some of what happened to Patricia. As the story takes us all the way up to present day, you'll learn about some of the court cases trying to get justice for these families forty years later, how the ESMA (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada) prison is now a museum to try and tell some of the desaparecidos stories and serve as a warning when eyes turn away, and how many grandchildren have been found and how many are still missing. It's a time in history we shouldn't look away from and hopefully, learn from, and this covered the emotional toll of living through such time and standing up to it pretty well.

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