Homelands by Alfredo Corchado

I am reading in two non-fiction genres intentionally these days in order to better understand the African American experience and the immigrant experience. I started on this quest a little over a year ago in response to the regular killing by police of unarmed black men and the imprisonment, separation, and alleged sexual exploitation of migrant children seeking asylum. This is one such book. Corchado is a journalist, but the story is largely told about his personal experience, some of which is related to his profession but a lot of it is about his struggle with what homeland means to him and to his closest friends and family members. His family immigrated to the United States when he was young and they all had experience picking produce in the Californis Central Valley, but once they had green cards and some degree of financial stability they moved to the border. The author does a good job of talking about the phenomena on the US-Mexico border as it relates to Mexican families. Some live on the US side, in his case El Paso, and some live on the Mexico side, but for them the border is without meaning, a fluid place that regardless of which side you live on your family, your culture and your language are the same. Corchado sent to college in El Paso, but then moved for his first job. He found two things: the first that he deeply missed his family and culture, so much so that he sought out people who were like him where he was. The second is that he wanted to return to the land of his birth, to live in Mexico. It was like he had a homing device, always pulling him southward. Over the years covered in this memoir he does return home and he does live for a time in Mexico, but as is true for many immigrants, he became a part of his new country as well, and to my ear he ends up feeling that his homeland is where his friends and family are, that it is not one place but rather many.