EMM BOOK DISCUSSION GUIDES
We have an incredible opportunity to learn from the experiences of our immigrant siblings by reading their words and understanding their contexts. Episcopal Migration Ministries offers these book discussion guides as a way to empower local congregations, book clubs, and other groups to learn more about immigrant communities and individuals.
For guidance on how to host a virtual book club, read this guide. The discussion guides are rich in resources and questions to get your discussion going, but if you have any questions or need assistance, please contact [email protected].
The Asylum Seekers: A Chronicle of Life, Death, and Community at the Border by Cristina Rathbone
The Asylum Seekers offers a rare narrative account of the horror of the US-Mexico border. Borders run through author Cristina Rathbone too, whose mother was a Cuban refugee. So in 2019 she travels to Juarez, unsure what to do but determined to learn.
Weaving intimate portraits of individuals with broader stories about the community, reporting from the border as a whole, and reflections on the meaning of faith in a place of suffering, Rathbone tells the story of Mexican asylum seekers living in a makeshift tent camp at the foot of a bridge. Life in the camp is both hectic and harrowing. Families arrive. Families leave. Families get through to the US. Families are returned from the US. Women weep, children squabble, and grown men sob over photographs of their murdered sons’ mutilated bodies.
Here too, however, are beauty, and empathy, and hope. Over time, a leadership team emerges. The community begins to convene daily meetings, establish systems of distribution for donations, and start classes for the kids. Serving as an unofficial chaplain, Rathbone is there through it all: listening, receiving, assisting, and most of all learning about what authentic faith looks like under conditions such as these.
Download the discussion guide for The Asylum Seekers: A Chronicle of Life, Death, and Community at the Border.
A Map is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home, edited by Nicole Chung & Mensah Demary
From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as twenty writers share provocative personal stories of existence between languages and cultures.
Download the discussion guide for A Map is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home.
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami
What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today.
Download the discussion guide for Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 by Jia Lynn Yang
The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law.
Download the discussion guide for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965.
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Looking beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMers, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented—and the mysteries of her own life. She finds the singular, effervescent characters across the nation often reduced in the media to political pawns or nameless laborers. The stories she tells are not deferential or naively inspirational but show the love, magic, heartbreak, insanity, and vulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects. In her incandescent, relentlessly probing voice, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio combines sensitive reporting and powerful personal narratives to bring to light remarkable stories of resilience, madness, and death. Through these stories we come to understand what it truly means to be a stray. An expendable. A hero. An American.
Download the discussion guide for The Undocumented Americans.
After the Last Border by Jessica Goudeau
The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees has been central to America’s identity for centuries–yet America has periodically turned its back at the times of greatest humanitarian need. “After the Last Border” is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the twenty-first century American dream, having won the “golden ticket” to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas. Writer and activist Jessica Goudeau tracks the human impacts of America’s ever-shifting refugee policy as both women narrowly escape from their home countries and begin the arduous but lifesaving process of resettling in Austin, Texas–a city that would show them the best and worst of what America has to offer.
Download the discussion guide for After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America.
We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria by Wendy Pearlman
We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria tells the story of the Syrian uprising, war, and refugee crisis through interviews that Wendy Pearlman conducted from 2012 through 2016 with more than 300 displaced Syrians across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. An accessible and deeply human entry point into one of worst humanitarian catastrophes of our times, the book both explains the Syrian conflict and conveys what it has been like for ordinary people to live it.
Download the discussion guide for We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria.
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen is an urgent, provocative and deeply personal account from Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who happens to be the most well-known undocumented immigrant in the United States. Born in the Philippines and brought to the U.S. illegally as a 12-year-old, Vargas hid in plain-sight for years, and went on to write for some of the most prestigious news organizations in the country while lying about where he came from and how he got here. Both a letter to and a window into Vargas’s America, Dear America is a transformative argument about migration and citizenship, and an intimate, searing exploration on what it means when the country you call your home doesn’t consider you one of its own.
Download the discussion guide for Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.
The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri
What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought to, and yet there are more than 25 million refugees in the world. To be a refugee is to grapple with your place in society, attempting to reconcile the life you have known with a new, unfamiliar home. All this while bearing the burden of gratitude in your host nation: the expectation that you should be forever thankful for the space you have been allowed. With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee recalibrates the conversation around the refugee experience. Here are the real human stories of what it is like to be forced to flee your home, and to journey across borders in the hope of starting afresh.
Download the discussion guide for The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil
Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks.
Download the discussion guide for The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After.
