Finding Motherland

In Finding Motherland, acclaimed nonfiction author Helen Thorpe shares seven essays she has written on the related themes of family, food, and migration. She takes us to the dairy farm in Ireland where her mother grew up, and depicts how Ireland is modernizing with surprising consequences. She describes her family's decision to immigrate to the United States and how, that reshaped her Irish-born parents. She shows us how the experience of becoming a mother is analogous to moving to a new country. She writes about her neighbors who share an immigrant story but lack documents, profiling an undocumented student who carries the American flag for his ROTC unit, and illustrating the enormous economic and legal challenges that face an undocumented mother. She captures the labor of men from Mexico and Honduras who work in fields and orchards to produce the locally grown food that we eat. In the final essay, she looks back at the Irish who arrived here in the 1840s and 1850s, penniless, starving, and often illiterate. Finding Motherland shows the reader how much past generations of immigrants have in common with families who are immigrating to the US today.