American Pie

Recently, life events have brought me to a place where I find myself in desperate need of one thing: information about immigration and migration. I haven’t focused on it, until now and Into the Beautiful North is about the only book that springs to mind.

My family’s history ranges from Native Mainer and Georgian roots long before settlers and disease arrived to documented membership in the Mayflower Society; to bootstrap tugging, Russian printing men working for pennies in Boston; to a grandpa who was harassed, at the age of ten, for carrying the last name Schmitz through the wrong decade; to speaking to Grandparents in my very bad Italian and their mediocre English.

With ingredients from everywhere, more added in each generation, I’m about as “American” as American can be. To be a conglomerate mess of cultures is what I always envision when I see our country and our continually borderless globe in the twenty first century.

Without going in to too much detail, then, it’s with a heavy heart that I embark on this journey through my family’s newest phases of understanding how we’re all put together. Hopefully, my reading will help me understand country quotas, the intensely impossible application adventure for citizenship and just how it is that we can begin the process of creating a better system for a better tomorrow.

If you have recently read anything worth picking up on any side of this issue, feel free to toss titles my way.