Immigrants’ Lives: Nonfiction

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is a professor of politics at Whitman College, where he teaches courses dealing with food, immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border. His writing has appeared in Believer, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Salon, and Gastronomica. He is the author of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf and Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) reveals the human consequences of militarizing what was once a more forgiving border. When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby U.S. border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. Following a misstep that led to her deportation, Aida found herself in a Mexican city marked by violence, in a country that was not hers. To get back to the United States and reunite with her son, she embarked on a harrowing journey. Taking us into detention centers, immigration courts, and the inner lives of Aida and other daring characters Aaron Bobrow-Strain exposes a violently unequal America. He also shows us that the heroes of our current immigration wars are less likely to be perfect paragons of virtue than complex, flawed human beings who deserve justice and empathy all the same.

Grace Talusan immigrated to the United States from the Philippines as a child with her parents. She has published essays, longform journalism, fiction and book reviews in publications such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Magazine, Boston Globe, and The Rumpus. In her memoir The Body Papers (Restless Books), Talusan retraces the move with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few brown kids with a brown face. At home, her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified. In this debut memoir, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness. In The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai called The Body Papers “[A] precise, delicately constructed memoir-in-essays. […] Talusan describes such experiences with unadorned prose that conveys a startling specificity…. Talusan has the instincts of a storyteller, teasing out her narrative through images and allusion.”