The American dream is alive, with a twist, in "Our Stories Carried Us Here," which offers 10 stories of young people who cross cultural barriers to make a new life in the Midwest.
The anthology includes a range of stories — narrators come from familiar immigration points such as Mexico, Liberia, Guatemala and Vietnam, and less familiar destinations including Chad, Kazakhstan and Pakistan — and an unexpected range of immigrant experiences.
We're introduced to Craig Moodie, a gifted student who emigrates from Jamaica to study at Macalester, the University of Minnesota, and later launch a career in neurogenetics, despite microaggressions along the way.
And Ruth Mekoulom, whose parents left Chad and Cameroon for North Dakota, to give her more educational opportunities as a deaf student.
Teenager Alex Tsipenyuk leaves Kazakhstan when his parents win the green card lottery, and Amara Solomon Kamara follows his heart to Minneapolis after meeting an American in Guinea.
The experience of two Dreamers, Sergio Cenoch from Mexico and Mary Anne Quiroz from the Philippines, encapsulates the anthology's layered approach to immigrant stories.
Brought to the U.S. by single mothers at a young age, they met at a St. Paul school in seventh grade and began organizing dance and cultural activities in response to bullying by white students. Their work evolved into the Mexican dance and drum group Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli.
The pair, who later married, helped launch the Indigenous Roots cultural space in the Dayton's Bluff neighborhood after fighting for funding and pushing back against a big developer.
