Whiskey Tender

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, death, suicidal ideation, mental illness, and substance use.

Taffa is the author and narrator of Whiskey Tender. The memoir follows her childhood and young adulthood, first on the Quechan (Yuma) reservation and later in Farmington, New Mexico.

Born in 1969, Taffa was Edmond and Lorraine’s third child, and she grew up on the reservation with three sisters—one younger and two older. Her mother was a Catholic Chicana woman, light-skinned enough to pass as white but with features that revealed her forgotten Indigenous ancestry, and Taffa’s father was half Quechan and half Laguna Pueblo. From early childhood, Taffa felt caught between her parents’ conflicting identities, unsure of where she belonged.

The family moved to Farmington in 1976, the year of the United States’ bicentennial. Taffa spent the summer memorizing the names of all the US presidents, hoping to impress her new classmates on the first day of school. She was particularly fond of Andrew Jackson, who shared her family’s name, and spent much of her time “fawning” over his picture. However, Taffa also began to “intuit” that there was something “complicated” about her family’s “political relationship with the United States” (88).