The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui Many of the essays reflect on the idea that through family we can identify what home means to us and as explored in one of the essays that can also mean a place in which we’ve lost a family member rendering the very country in which you bury your loved one ultimately home. This collective anthology features writers reflecting on the idea of “home” as migrants and first/second/third generation immigrants. It’s a memoir that I found carefully and rawly captures the duality of living between two cultures.Ī Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family and the Meaning of Home edited by Nicole Chung & Mensah Demary has actively contributed and supported that violence. This memoir provides a meticulous detailing of the systemic violence in El Salvador, as well as the many ways in which the U.S. In exposing this history and relationship between El Salvador and the country of his birth, the United States, Lovate begins to piece together how much the history has impacted and vibrated through his own family and generations before it. In this memoir, journalist Roberto Lovato peels through the history of El Salvador, the country from which his parents are from. I initially picked up this book because bookstagrammer consistently advocated for it-and I am so glad I did. Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americasby Roberto Lovato This list of books are ones that I feel explore and often expose the idea of the “American Dream.” Nonfiction: For me, I like to label those promises and ideas they had as their ultimate “American Dream” and it’s through literature that I’ve learned more about what it meant for them, for us, and all the things we often didn’t speak about. The promise, this strange new place so far away from our home country held and the chance at changing the future for our family, specifically my future and that of my siblings all made it clear to me why my parents made the decision they did.

In those same conversations, I recall understanding that this was all part of a series of ideas passed on from family members or family friends about how different life would be in the United States for us.

I do remember overhearing multiple conversations they had with family members, filled with various reasons that all could be summed up to this: we wanted a better life for our family. Growing up, I don’t recall a moment I asked my parents how we ended up in the United States or why they made the difficult decision to leave their family and homeland for a place so far away.

A dream called home a memoir