The Immigrant Perspective

What does home mean when you've lived in two countries, moved around a lot, and built a life far from where you started? For my younger sister, Laurie, the answer is simple: home is just where she is.

Laurie was seven when the Mangan family left Kilkee, a small beach town on the west coast of Ireland, and landed in Southeast Tennessee. She is the youngest of five siblings, and her immigrant experience may be the most quietly radical of all of them. She doesn't romanticize Ireland. She doesn't feel particularly nostalgic. And she hasn't been back since 2009.

In this conversation, the sisters talk about what they each remember from those final weeks in Ireland, arriving in the American South for the first time, being picked on at school for their accents and their short hair, and the very different ways they've each made sense of leaving a country they didn't choose to leave.

Also: a stink bomb, a potential house buyer, and one sister hiding behind a bathroom door while the other took the fall.

Siobhan Duff didn't choose to leave Newfoundland. The economy made that decision for her. When Canada closed the cod fishery in the early 1990s, an entire province's livelihood disappeared overnight. Siobhan, a newly minted physician, and her husband Jim, a residential builder, found themselves with no viable path forward at home. So they left. Thirty years later, they're still in Chattanooga. Leaving now, Siobhan says, would feel like a loss in its own right.

Laura Contreras-Alanis arrived in the United States in 1974 - a little girl from Michoacán, Mexico, told she was going to Disneyland. What followed was anything but a fairy tale: migrant farm work in Central California, multiple moves as a teenager, dropping out of high school, a painful estrangement from her family, and eventually - decades later - a U-Haul headed to Knoxville, Tennessee, with five kids, a terrified-of-flying husband, and a grandmother's passing along the way.

In this conversation, Laura shares the full arc: the privileged childhood in Mexico where everyone knew her name, the culture shock of apartment life in California, the years she spent deliberately distancing herself from her Mexican identity as a form of self-protection, and the slow, tender return to her roots. She talks about the "un trastorno princesa" her sister teases her about, the brother who simply got out of the car in Knoxville one day and never went back to California, and what it means to become a citizen by choice - not by default.

Laura is warm, funny, and searingly honest. This one stays with you.

Hugh and Kathleen MacMenamin have lived in the United States for over 55 years, but ask them where home is, and they'll tell you Ireland. In this episode, we trace their journey from post-war Belgium to Dublin to Duluth, through medical school, internships, residencies, five children, and 14 grandchildren. Kathleen shares what it was like to grow up Flemish in Dublin, including the time she was called a "foreign pest" at school. Hugh talks about the professor who told his medical class that half of them would have to leave Ireland just to find work. Together, they reflect on the America they chose in 1969 and what it means to love a country that keeps changing around you.

Horacio grew up in Sonsonate, El Salvador during a civil war. When his mother left for the US in 1981, he was six years old, and he wouldn't live with her again for eleven years. In the silence she left behind, he found the Beatles.

In this episode, Horacio shares how music became his refuge, what it was like to land in Miami as a teenager who didn't speak English, the surprising prejudice he encountered from other Hispanic immigrants, and how he eventually built a life in Atlanta with his American wife and twin daughters, named Sadie and Eleanor, after Beatles songs.

Horacio's memoir, Finding Shelter in Sound, is available now. You can find him on Instagram at findingshelterinsound.

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Episode 3 takes me to the living room of two people I'm genuinely lucky to know. Ben Zimunya was born in Zimbabwe in 1985, navigated a nomadic childhood through Kenya and Tanzania, attended boarding school in a different country than his parents for all of high school, and landed in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the summer of 2003 with $800 and a plan that stretched maybe one semester ahead. Cara, who many of you know as the kind of teacher who checks in on her 5th graders' mental health during a pandemic, is his wife, a Tennessee native, and an extraordinarily honest voice for what it's like to be the American spouse in a "third culture" marriage.

This conversation went places I didn't expect. We talk about the economics of a collapsing Zimbabwe, including the literal box of cash Ben's family assembled to buy his plane ticket. We talk about what it means to discover, at age 40, that your tribal identity was actually invented by a British linguist. And we talk about the $10,000+ reality of doing immigration "the legal way."

Cara also says something in this episode that I think a lot of spouses and partners of immigrants need to hear. I'll let her say it herself.

(A note on audio quality: I'm a new and very amateur podcaster, and this episode reflects that. Bear with me - the stories are worth it.)

Forty years ago, my parents traded the West Coast of Ireland for the rolling hills of Tennessee. But what does that journey look like from the other side of the couch?

In this inaugural episode, I sit down with my wife, Lois, a Michigan native who has spent our marriage watching me navigate life between two worlds. We talk about why I still cry when the plane touches down in Shannon, the dark humor that's uniquely Irish, and what it really means to be the spouse of someone whose heart is permanently divided.

And then, near the end, Lois asks me a question I wasn't ready for, and my own answer surprises us both.

The Immigrant Perspective is a podcast for anyone who has ever felt like they belong somewhere between two places - and for the people who love them.

Music featured in this episode: "Talitha" by China Kent (used with permission). This trailer sets the stage for our upcoming season of stories on identity, belonging, and the immigrant perspective.