Immigrant Strong: Second Issue
Books on migrant families & essays on traveling to Mexico, hiking and gardening
Immigrant Women Writing About Immigrant Families
Maybe it’s the former journalist in me, but I’ve always overwhelmingly read non-fiction, so one of my New Year’s resolutions was to read more fiction. We’re halfway through 2019 and I’m happy to say I’ve made lots of progress on that front in large part thanks to great women immigrant authors. Natalia Sylvester’s Everyone Knows You Go Home and Melissa Rivero’s debut The Affairs of the Falcóns are two novels that take you along the journeys of undocumented immigrants—their harrowing paths to the United States and their steadfast determination to build lives for their families. Both authors hail from Peru, and Rivero was undocumented for most of her childhood. It would be great if more Americans, including our legislators, read books about undocumented families so they can better understand the poverty and violence that drives them to leave their homes and the fear that permeates their day-to-day life in their adopted country.
Essays
Even for immigrants who are here legally, getting papers, fitting in and belonging can be really challenging, if it’s even possible. These are some of the areas Raksha Vasudevan explores in this beautiful LitHub piece, Hiking Cormac McCarthy’s Western Wilderness During an Immigration Crisis.
“To be unwelcome in a place, yet not allowed to leave—it was almost laughable. This is what it is to be an immigrant, I thought: perpetually straddling the border between belonging and not.”
Some of the themes about the border and identity reminded me of this Guernica essay by Fernanda Santos, “The Best Kind of People”: Shifting Definitions of Citizenship and the Making of Arizona. Santos, who is from Brazil and is the former Phoenix bureau chief of The New York Times, skillfully weaves reporting with personal information and historical context.
I’m always gushing about Longreads, and here is another one of their essays I enjoyed—Feliz Moreno’s Lengua Tacos. Many of us who straddle multiple cultures, countries and languages will relate to her experience visiting Mexico.
“In this country it is not my dark eyes, brown skin, and wild hair that give me away as someone who is not from here, it is my actions that will betray me, the words I stumble over.”
I have the opposite of a green thumb—I have killed everything from bamboo to succulents—but I enjoyed this Catapult piece by Christine H. Lee, At My Urban Farm, I’m Growing My Family and Growing Our Sanctuary.
“In my own urban farm, I connect back to my own culture. To, pun intended, my roots. To a tradition of gardening and my family’s self-identity. To what it means to be a child of immigrants and help things grow.”
Here is a short New Yorker piece, Hereafter, Faraway, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose work is always guided by his experience as a refugee.
“There is no trace of the refugee about her, even though she had been a refugee twenty years earlier, when her homeland had been bisected at the seventeenth parallel by powers that did not ask her opinion.”
Twitter Follow Recommendation
Laila Lalami, who hails from Morocco, is the author of four novels, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a professor and an essayist. She tweets about a lot of issues—immigration, politics, books, etc.—and does that with precision and insight.
Some housekeeping
If you missed the first issue, you can find it here. Please move this e-mail to your Primary folder and mark it as “not spam” to make sure you get future ones. (You may also need to check your Promotions and Social folders). If you are enjoying this newsletter, feel free to forward it and ask others to subscribe. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of June, which is LGBT Pride Month as well as Immigrant Heritage Month.
Vesna