Photo by Laurence Thorpe of wife Marie and daughter Helen in the 1960s, shortly after the family immigrated to the United States. Cover design by Andi Todaro.
Finding Motherland is a digital collection of essays on the themes of family, food, and migration. The author depicts life on the dairy farm in rural Ireland where her mother was raised, documents labor done by migrants with agricultural visas in orchards on the Western Slope in her home state of Colorado, and celebrates the accomplishments of an undocumented student who carried the American flag in his ROTC unit in the years before DACA offered him protection.
She also explains the predicament of a single mother without documents who makes a living by selling street food at baseball games in their shared hometown of Denver, Colorado. As the cost of rent triples over the course of a decade, making ends meet becomes increasingly problematic.
In the book’s final essay, the author recalls the arrival of Irish immigrants in the wake of the potato famines, and asks why so many Irish-Americans are hostile toward those who are migrating today. She posits this may be due to a misplaced “ethnostalgia” for a bygone homeland of yesteryear.
You can find the essay collection as an ebook on Amazon. It’s also possible to listen to the author read the essay called “Great Hunger,” about the treatment of migrant families by ethnically Irish-American political appointees.