Yet somehow we've been taught to look down on it and even criminalize it and look at it as if it's a drain rather than really something miraculous and quite beautiful. And it's something that we admire in the natural world, and we'll marvel about it and watch documentaries about how animals have this instinct to migrate to pursue resources when the human species has done exactly the same thing. We've all arrived at the place where we are because somebody before us migrated. I had never thought of migration as kind of a mirror image of colonialism in that way.ĮNGEL: I think that what some people don't realize is that migration is the history of this planet. He says, maybe we are creatures of passage meant to cross oceans just like the first infectors of our continent in order to take back what was taken.
SHAPIRO: There's a really interesting way that one of the characters - Mauro, the father - frames immigration. But what we do have in common is that loss of homeland, all the doubts and the longing and wondering if you made the right decision in disrupting your family history and leaving your homeland to begin a new life in another one.
The nuances and the details of our family's migration story are different. She came to the United States with my father, similar to the characters of Elena and Mauro in "Infinite Country," in order to gamble on a better life and a better future for themselves and for their children. And so how much of this writing came from your own experience?ĮNGEL: I could say in some ways everything, and I could say in some ways very little. And from what I understand, your own family has members, relatives in both of those countries. And she has one week to get back to Bogota because a plane ticket is waiting for her to finally get to the United States and be reunited with her mother and her other siblings after so many years apart.ĪRI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: And so the book is in part an adventure story but at its core is this family that straddles two countries, divided between Colombia and the U.S. So Talia has lived 15 years away from her mother, and where "Infinite Country" begins, she is locked up in a penitentiary for young girls. But she was actually born in the United States and sent back to Bogota, her mother's hometown, as a baby as her mother tried to make way, make a better life for her other two children, Karina and Nando.
PATRICIA ENGEL: Talia is a 15-year-old girl who is living in Bogota, Colombia. Our co-host Ari Shapiro spoke to her about the main character in this book, a teenager named Talia. In this story, the central family has one foot in Colombia and one in the U.S. It's an ongoing process, a constant flow of people across borders. In the new novel "Infinite Country," immigration is not a single event that happens at a point in time.
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