Stanford Law School

Michael Angel Nava is an American attorney and writer. Michael Nava grew up in a predominantly working-class Mexican neighborhood in Sacramento,... California called Gardenland. In an essay of the same title, he wrote about his neighborhood: “The best way to think of Gardenland is not as an American suburb at all, but rather as a Mexican village, transported perhaps from Guanajuato, where my grandmother's family originated, and set down lock, stock and chicken coop in the middle of California” His maternal family settled there in 1920 after escaping the Mexican Revolution. His maternal grandparents were the most important influence of his childhood. His maternal grandfather was a Yaqui Indian, a tribe persecuted by the Mexican government at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. He wrote about his grandfather in the essay “Abuelo” published in John Preston’s 1992 anthology, A Member of the Family: Gay Men Write About Their Families. His grandmother was an influential force whose piety and humility were highlighted by her Catholic beliefs. A precocious child, Nava was constantly reading.
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