2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Shortlist, Nonfiction
2024 NBCC Award Finalist, Autobiography
A family murder kept secret, the mysterious disappearance of her father, the systematic erasing of family photographs, a turbulent relationship with her mother, layers of trauma and abuse. In Mother Archive, Erika Morillo reconciles these demons of her past by searching for and seeking out the roots of her family. Intertwining memories with archival family photographs, news clippings, film stills, and artistic images, Morillo revisits her childhood growing up in the Dominican Republic, a place and time riddled with a history of violence and a tradition of erasure.
Spanning three generations across three different countries, this memoir works as a map in which the author traces incidents in her family history to help her understand herself and her own experience as a mother.
鈥Mother Archive is the most moving and perceptive memoir I鈥檝e read in years. Erika Morillo鈥檚 captivating image-text memoir is an inescapable open door into Morillo鈥檚 courageous investigation of a life scarred by the betrayal of those meant to protect us, our mothers. A fascinating psychological collage of prose and images, Morillo鈥檚 unflinchingly honest exploration of her life, from a tragic childhood in the Dominican Republic to NYC to Chile and back again, is also a woman鈥檚 quest for love and security鈥攊n her adopted mother figures, in her art, and in motherhood as she tries, with heart-rending compassion, to become the mother she never had.鈥濃擩ulia Fierro, author, The Gypsy Moth Summer
鈥淎 one-of-a-kind book, beautiful, startling, and heartbreaking . . . Morillo has a novelist鈥檚 profound heart and the piercing truth-seeking of a documentarian.鈥濃擩unot D铆az, Pulitzer Prize鈥搘inning author, This Is How You Lose Her
"Early in Mother Archive, Erika Morillo holds her ear to the warm breath of her dying abuelo and takes in the devastating recognition of all she鈥檒l never know. The scene reverberates with this extraordinary memoir鈥檚 sensuousness and subtle fury, its layering of political history and family life, and its unrelenting awareness of a past that cannot be recovered, of all that鈥檚 been washed away. Morillo has created a dizzyingly complex visual and verbal world, where the brutality of history courses in the blood and curls the hair at the nape of the neck. At once a lyric confession, a body of photographic evidence, and an elegy for the irrecoverable past, Mother Archive begins with fire but is traversed by water鈥攕ource of life and scene of death, symbol of distance and the substance in which images are developed. And at its center is an aching portrait of the mother, in all her uncanny similitude and impossible otherness. Morillo tells a crushing story about the hungers of migration and memory, about the scars of history, and about the undyingness of maternal desire. Readers will want to sit with her memoir's affecting lessons for a long, long time."鈥Christopher Rovee, author, New Critical Nostalgia
