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At the peak of the pandemic, Jessica Hoppe was living in New York and had been sober for about four years. She regularly attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in person up until lockdown, when meetings, like most things, moved online. After a few months, she was “set to autopilot,” often only vaguely listening to the mostly white members during their shares—until one afternoon, she heard something that made her start.
“I just wanted to identify as a person of color in recovery,” said the voice.
Hoppe quickly turned her camera on. She and the speaker were the only two brown faces in the room.
Hoppe had never heard someone else mention being a person of color during meetings before because you’re not supposed to talk about that. The time she’d brought it up in a meeting, she was quickly shot down by another attendee. “We don’t say that here; there’s no color,” Hoppe recalls the woman telling her. “We are all one. There is no us, them, or they, we are all the same, no matter color.”
That was one of many painful turning moments for Hoppe, a Honduran Ecuadorian writer and author of the new memoir First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream. The beautifully written and researched debut feels like a lot more than a memoir. It is a journalistic exploration that examines how politics have made their way into recovery spaces, the history of substance use disorders in communities of color and what one could and couldn’t speak of in Hoppe’s own family—including even saying the word “alcoholic.”
“Popular trends in the sobriety movement say the label [alcoholic] is harmful, but I have found it empowering,” Hoppe writes on her popular Instagram account @NuevaYorka, which became an outlet to share her sobriety journey at the height of the pandemic.
Family holds a conversation around self-medicating, and how racism and oppression are “institutionally sanctioned forms of chronic stress with quantifiable biological effects on a targeted population,” Hoppe writes. “All our painful life experiences cannot simply be forgiven, or prayed away; our bodies have made something toxic with those feelings.”
It’s no argument that AA has saved many lives. AA is the world’s biggest sobriety network, with over 2 million members worldwide. But there is a lot to question in many sobriety spaces for BIPOC communities.
Any time race or family traumas became a talking point in groups, Hoppe and others were shut down, told that it was their ego that wanted to blame parents or systems of oppression for their substance use disorder. “AA can prove an insidious dogma and a dangerous place for those who are vulnerable,” Hoppe writes. “As I came into a profound awareness of what was happening to me, the program began to stifle my progress and stand in opposition to it. We all brought this baggage with us—but we weren’t equally entitled to unpack it.”
Family opens with a telling of Hoppe’s family origins, then shares her coming-of-age experience growing up as the only Latinx kid in all-white classrooms in New Jersey. In Family, Hoppe lifts the corner of the rug on her family’s history. While Hoppe offers honest tellings of her own struggles with addiction, this is no “trauma porn.” Family offers what the literary and sobriety communities need more of: a Latinx writer who honestly examines what needs to shift in sobriety spaces.
“The collective critical consciousness surrounding white supremacy requires that we call it out, especially where it exists within ourselves,” Hoppe writes. “There cannot be a place dedicated to wellness…where some are forced to suppress themselves.”
SEE IT: Jessica Hoppe will be in conversation with Tessa Hulls and Lupita Aquino at the Portland Book Festival at the Portland Art Museum’s Miller Gallery, 1119 SW Park Ave., portlandartmuseum.org. 2 pm Saturday, Nov. 2.