Her heritage trail

IT BEGINS with a memory: A 6-year-old girl hurls herself in front of a moving car. Sustaining a badly split lip and nothing more, a young Stephanie Elizondo Griest decides that automobiles are best avoided altogether. The specter of children dashing across the asphalt, "perhaps images of my former self," haunts her on those rare occasions when she does drive. So call it divine intervention or simple chance when Griest, en route to Corpus Christi, Texas, from Los Angeles, encounters a group of people, one a child, darting across a hot stretch of Interstate 10. It is a startling image -- unnerving, crystalline, visceral -- meant, it seems, exclusively for her on this isolated ribbon of highway. "My lifelong phantom has actualized," she writes.

Prompted in part by that encounter, Griest determines she must venture south of the frontera to make peace with the elusive "Mexicana" inside of her, the side she tried so hard to eradicate as a child because of stigmas and preconceptions, only to embrace it as a young adult in order to reap its benefits. She confesses: "Nearly every accolade I have received . . . has been at least partly due to the genetic link I share with the people charging through the snake-infested brush."

But if it is guilt made manifest on a lonely freeway that drives Griest to bid a temporary adios to her Brooklyn apartment and board a plane for Mexilandia, it is her steadfast and shrewd journalism that prevents "Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines" from becoming a puerile vision quest. Instead, it speaks with such ferocious and unyielding honesty that it is difficult to ignore this work.

Griest combs the country and encounters priests, gay rights activists, a half-Vietnamese dominatrix and workers returning home from the U.S. for the first time in years. She attends protests, a quinceanera and a baptism deep in Zapatista territory, all the while driven by an almost manic desire to figure out the common denominator bonding her to this nation and its people.

At first, everything is simple enough as Griest embarks on her pilgrimage. She moves into a house full of gay men in the ultraconservative state of Queretaro. Her roommates, who christen her "Fanni," teach her the concept of being flojo (lazy) and take her dancing in Mexico City's hip, glitzy Zona Rosa district. She attends a lucha libre match and interviews wrestlers with catchy monikers like Atomico and Dance Boy. She chases down the ghosts of dead ancestors in the dusty town of Cruillas in Tamaulipas.