Hello, everyone, and welcome to then Again, a podcast by the northeast Georgia history center. I'm Liba Beecham, director of operations. And today I have with me Tia Snowden, director of advocacy for United Way, Hall County and New York Times bestselling author, Patricia Ingle, who will discuss her book Infinite Country. Tia, Patricia, thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks.

Happy to be with you.

Absolutely. And we have a big event coming up. We have on Monday, September 11 from six to 08:00 P.m at the Downtown Hall County Library. There's going to be an author meet and greet with Patricia Ingle. And, Tia, could you tell us how this event got started, as it is part of the National Endowment for the Arts, their Big Read Project?

At United Way, we do a lot of grants. So this one came along, and we thought it would fit right in with our community conversations as part of our one hall advocacy group. And so we applied. And United Way of Hall County is one of 62 organizations nationwide to receive the NEA Big Read grant, which is a program of the National Endowment of the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. So the grant supports a Community Read initiative, and we chose Infinite Country as our book of choice. And, of course, the topic is immigration. So along with that comes all of the events, with the kickoff being Patricia visiting.

And, Tia, can you speak to why the topic of immigration is so important to our community here in Gainesville and Hall County at large?

Well, 30% of the population in Hall County is Hispanic, and we really, at United Way, wanted to do something that brings that culture into a space where we can talk about it and come together as a group of people to talk about a perspective that we may not have actually thought of before.

Yeah. So it's a great opportunity to not only connect to the Latino community, the Hispanic community here in Hall County, but to also for folks that are unaware of the kinds of challenges that are associated with immigration. There are so many challenges along that journey that are really spoken to in your book, Patricia, that I think will be really enlightening to a lot of the folks that visit at the author meet and greet. And of course, this is also a great opportunity to get the book Infinite Country and even get it signed, which is very exciting, too. And, of course, another opportunity to simply have a conversation, like you were saying, Tia, and ask questions. So, Patrice, I'd love to start from the beginning of your own story. Before we dive into the story of Infinite Country, could you talk to us about your childhood? Where did you grow up? And tell us about your family dynamic growing?

Oh, okay, sure. Well, thanks again for having me, and I'm looking forward to coming to Hall County and meeting with readers and with the community there. So I am the daughter of Colombian parents, Colombian immigrants, and I was born in the United States, and I grew up in New Jersey. I'm the youngest of two children, but also one of many, many cousins. I grew up within a very large extended family of Colombians and a very artistic family too. There were a lot of musicians and painters in my family, and also my grandmother wrote. So that's really where my interest in writing as a form of expression began. Although I think it's really typical among immigrant families to be a storytelling family, because often when you leave one country and go to the other, you come with very few things, and really your most treasured things are reduced to stories. And it's the only way to especially as time goes on and a new generation is born, is really the only way to relay your history and to share where you came from and to let the next generation know about the home country, what was left behind, and what your roots are. So storytelling is really an integral part of the condition of immigration, and it's extremely common. And that's where my origins as a writer started.

Yeah. And it seems really special that your grandmother was also a writer. Can you speak to what kind of writing she did herself and what kind of stories you learned from your grandmother?

Well, as I said, I came from a very creative family, but I grew up in a family where artists all had day jobs. My relatives who were musicians all had day jobs. And that was my sense of what it meant to be a creative person, was that everybody had their art, their form of expression, but also everybody had to live and pay the bills. My grandmother was the mother of nine children. My father is the oldest. So when she was not busy taking care of her nine children or emigrating, she wrote on the side for herself. She didn't publish. Sometimes her poems got read on the radio or something like that, or published in a newspaper, but she wrote books just for herself, for her own enjoyment and for her own entertainment. So my entire childhood, that's really the only example I have of what it meant to be a writer, was that you do it for the pure love of writing. I had no sense of the business of it, how one gets published. I didn't know any other writers. I just knew artists who were extremely passionate and dedicated to what they did for no other reason than seeing the value of the art for themselves.

That's really beautiful to have that kind of creativity in your family and that sense of like, we do this because we love it. We do this because it shares a part of us, a part of our soul. And it's interesting you mentioned that you have a larger family, a larger extended family. Could you speak to us about the dynamic of your family? What would it be like? What kind of occasions would your family get together on, and what would that scene look like?

Well, my father's entire family, almost immediate family, all his siblings and their partners and children were all in the United States, whereas my mother's entire family was in Colombia. So I had family on both sides. We normally, for example, got together for Noce Buena, which is Christmas Eve. That's when all the cousins, everybody got together. There was a huge distribution of presents, of food, and it was very, very joyful for us. So that's very fond memories. It was always at my house, my parents house. My mom hosted it for everybody. And these are some of our greatest memories. The house just exploding with people, and everybody brought friends and friends of friends, and it was just endless arrival of people. And then when I would go back to Colombia, it was similar. We would arrive there to see the family there and also have really joyful gatherings.

Yeah. And growing up in these, would you consider it growing up in two distinct cultures, like an American culture versus Colombian culture, or do you really see the blend of the two in your childhood experience?

I grew up in a Colombian household. I was living within the United States. My household was definitely Colombian household, so I didn't really see a division maybe until I walked out the door, went to school or something like that. I felt very much grounded in my parents cultural origins when I was home.

And as a younger person, what did it mean to you as a child to know that you're the child of immigrants or that maybe a lot of your peers don't share the same culture or traditions, and they might not understand that part of you? I mean, can you talk to us about what it felt like to be a child of immigrants when you were growing up?

Well, for me, it's completely normal. And for a lot of people close to me, it was also normal. My parents had a lot of friends who were immigrants from other countries, not necessarily Colombia, from Cuba, Lebanon, Armenia, different places. And a lot of my friends were also the children of immigrants. So for me, it's actually hard to imagine what it would be like to grow up in the same place your parents did, to grow up in the same place where your family has been for generations. That, for me, is so hard to understand, because for me, it's totally normal to be displaced. And I grew up around people like that. Largely the people closest to me share that experience.

I think that's really cool that you were surrounded by other folks that shared different backgrounds and traditions and cultures. That's something that I feel like is a really valuable experience as a child. And is there something about your experience with having various cultures and interacting through friends and family that you feel like was of great value to you later in life? Did it offer you any kind of perspective that you may not have had otherwise?

Again, it's all I've ever been is a daughter of immigrants and part of immigrant communities. These are the people that I most love, that I most admire, that I most look up to. I've always seen immigrants as the most courageous people in the world. Of course, I had a very intimate perspective on what it takes to immigrate. I knew not only from my own family, but from the families, family, friends, the sacrifices, the pain, the melancholy, the sadness, the homesickness, everything that comes with it. From feeling like an outsider, sometimes being mistreated, but also the great rewards of it, of being able to have opportunities and give your children opportunities you may not otherwise have been able to. I grew up also with one of my best friends. She's a Ukrainian refugee. She came as a child in the 80s. So again, everyone there were very high stakes in a lot of these immigration stories. So for me, I admire immigrants, and I am just in awe of their ingenuity, of their vision, of their courage, compassion, resilience. And this is why I draw so much inspiration from their stories.

Absolutely. And can you speak to those challenges and those sacrifices that were made by your own family, the stories that have been passed down? I'd love to know what they had to overcome because I'm sure that, of course, from my perspective of someone from not an immigrant family, I've never been through the process of any kind of immigration. I know that there are so many obstacles that I am not thinking of or I'm not aware of. Could you speak to those obstacles and challenges that your parents faced when they were immigrating?

Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you say that you don't identify as being from an immigrant family when the large majority of Americans are unless they're indigenous to this country.

It's a good point that simply going back generations and generations, we're immigrants. But not having that this is something.

That happens, is that at a certain point in time when the immigration story becomes further back in a family's trajectory, there is a disassociation from it where even descendants are not even able to see that in their own story and their own history.

That's a good point. Yeah.

And the fact is, the large majority of us, except a very few Americans, do have that in our family story. Those of us who have it very recently in our family story, in our same generation or in the one before, maybe two generations back already, perhaps we have it more closely so we have a closer perspective. But I think it's important, and that's something that I try to do, is get people to recollect their own family story and know that all those sacrifices are somewhere in your family line. Somewhere in your family line was the person who decided to leave either by choice or by force or by circumstance. There was the person that confronted that same rupture and that same homesickness, that same pain, that same sense of loss, and who changed your family history forever by leaving that point of origin. So of course somebody like me, we have it right here and we know what that is to be different from our parents. But you have that in your history.

I'm so glad you point that out because it's hard to recognize that when we have this identity of American and then we think especially as someone who works at a history museum where I get to reflect on the past and the challenges of the past, but to be able to pause and say, well, wait a second. Like you said, there were immigrants in my family history that had to make very similar big decisions for themselves and challenges that it's hard to even comprehend just given the challenges of history going back, just logistically, technologically, dealing with disease, et cetera. And so that's a very good point to make in that in the story of immigrants today, folks that have had generations of families here can still appreciate the fact that their descendants had these stories that unfortunately may have been lost to us in many circumstances, but they're also things that we can learn about our history and contemplate about our past. I appreciate you bringing that up.

Yeah. And the idea of things being things lost is also we're kind of limited by our own conceptions of what that means, thinking that because we don't recall it, we don't have access to that firsthand knowledge, that it's somehow not a part of us. Whereas science has made these huge advances in the study of epigenetics to understand that just like we carry disease or certain genetic predispositions, that things like trauma and loss and these emotional experiences do transcend the human experience through the DNA. There's been studies done through the descendants of Holocaust survivors and how descendants who had never met those never met those relatives still somehow that trauma lives through the genes. So sometimes we only think about the things that we inherit that are bad in our DNA or our personality or our hair color or our physical features. But there's so much that we don't understand about what we carry in our lineage, down to our stories of diaspora and migration.

Yeah. And so much more to learn as we learn more about what we carry literally within us and what we also carry in our traditions, in our family stories that are handed down and encouraging people to learn more and do a bit more digging into their own past. I think that can really speak to someone who's trying to understand or maybe doesn't understand the immigrant experience today can make that personal connection to their own history and consider the challenges faced by both people in the past and today. And so, speaking to your own family's experience, can you share with us? Can you take us back to the decision of them immigrating to the United States, the why and the how, and, of course, the challenges they faced along the way?

Well, my parents came separately. My father came with his family, and my mother came to study for a couple of years with her family. But then my mother had to return to Colombia. But my parents had met in the meantime and fell in love. So they married in Colombia, and then they returned together to the United States. So my parents both lived their entire childhoods in Colombia and came out in their course. If you know a bit about Colombian history, colombia was under the gauntlet of half a century of civil armed conflict, which trickled down into the cities with a lot of economic instability and things like that. And my parents, like so many Colombians, decided to explore. And often that's just the emphasis of immigration, of an immigration story. Sometimes there's not some massive obstacle or anything like that, but it's really everything that has pushed the human race to explore around our planet is just that sense of movement seeking movement and seeing what is beyond what we already know, beyond the frontier. So that's what my parents did. And very typical of immigrants, for a long time, they thought that they would go back, but they didn't, and so they stayed.

And when they were making the decision to immigrate to the US. Do you know of any specific obstacles that they may have not foreseen or particular stories that just speak to how difficult it can be for someone to immigrate to the United States?

As you can imagine, language, culture, I mean, the standard north American social culture is quite different from the latin American one, particularly Colombian culture, which is very family centered. So there is definitely cultural differences, language differences, language barriers, and acclimation. Mind you, my parents come from an equatorial country, so even just the climate and the seasons was a big adjustment for them.

I'm curious to know, you said you were inspired by your grandmother as a writer, this family of artists, but when it comes to infinite country, was there a particular moment when you knew that you wanted to write that story in particular, or was that something that was on your mind and heart for a while?

Well, infinite country is my fourth book, but all of my books have explored immigration in different ways. But in a way, this was a story that was a long time coming for me. I knew that I wanted to write the story of a family, and I wanted to explore something that I've always observed, which is how members of a family can be unified by their immigration experience. The process of coming over, the leaving and the arriving, they all share that. But at the same time, they're each having their own private experience. So I really wanted to explore that what they say, what they don't say, what they share with each other, what they don't share, and those spaces in between. It took me a while to figure out how to go about that, but I wanted to tell a family story in that way, a complete way, but also from the broader perspective, but a more intimate one as well. Now, Infinite Country is set largely in Bogota, which is my mother's hometown, which I'm actually flying there on Sunday. It's a place you know pretty well, and I've always been intrigued by the Andean landscape and my mother shared with us. I was growing up a lot of the Musca, which is indigenous civilization of that Andean region, and their ancestral knowledge, which is also part of her heritage. So a lot of those are threaded into Infinite Country, and I began from there.

So in writing Infinite Country, you mentioned that going to Bogota, this is where your mother hails from. I'm curious how immersing yourself in Bogota and the life there helped you flesh out the idea for Infinite Country. What kind of influences from your own mother's life there and your own experiences there can we see in the book itself?

Well, I am a fiction writer, so one of the things I love most about fiction is writing, not about my life. Yeah. So there's not really anything autobiographical in it other than it's partially set in my mom's hometown to bow with that. But of course, a lot of my inspiration has come from time that I spent there. As I said, I have a lot of family there, visiting family. But also a lot of my books are published in Spanish, so I do go back to Colombia for sometimes book related events and for those I'm often invited to festivals around the country. So I've also gotten to travel the country a lot, and it's a very ecologically diverse country, a really vast and complex natural landscape, and it's quite captivating to me. So I've always been interested in the relationship that humans have to the natural world. What is seen, what is unseen, the mystical forces and traditional knowledge as well. And I was trying to harness all this into the life and experience of a family from there as well. It's not my family. It really has very little to do with my family story, but it is a very typical family. There are things about the family in Infinite Country that resemble many, many families that I know from different countries and their trajectory. Sometimes people think that immigration is kind of this walking through a door, you leave and you're here. And what I was really trying to write through with Infinite Country is about the in betweenness of immigration and all the nuanced feelings in between, which often is full of regret and doubt and wondering if you made the right decision or if you should just pack it all up and go back home where everyone you love is. So it's really an exploration of that. And of course, those are emotions that I knew very well because I've seen it in immigrants all around me, all my right.

Right. And maybe you could speak to the central characters of Infinite Country. Maybe we could start with Elena and I hope I'm saying it correctly, moro.

Yeah.

Could you tell us about these characters? Because it seems like their story is what really sets the action in motion in Infinite Country.

Yeah. So Infinite Country begins in ways with Elena and Mauro, who meet as teenagers and fall in love and have a teenage relationship. They have a daughter together, but they, again, like many immigrants, are just kind of infected by curiosity and a spirit of adventure. And they lock into some tourist visas to come to the United States. And they come, as many people do, just thinking that they're going to have an extended vacation, check things out and go back. Life starts to change very rapidly for them once they come and they decide to overstay their visas. And you follow them on that trajectory and you see how their family grows and evolves in the different circumstances that they are confronted with.

And when it comes to I know that these two characters are coming to the United States. And during the story, do they remain undocumented and experience that immigrant experience in the United States?

Well, the family in Infinite Country is specific and also not uncommon in that they are two parents and three children who all occupy different statuses on the immigration spectrum. And that's a frustrating part of immigration is often being reduced to your status, which can change depending on the government, which can change depending on a new law or an old law or whatever, or dates on a calendar and whatever the paperwork dictates at that particular time. So it's often a frustrating and challenging state of limbo for a lot of families, especially when different members have different statuses for different reasons. So this is a family that encapsulates that. I don't want to give too much away from the plot and talk about what happened, but I think that tells you something.

Yeah. And I could see that being really valuable as a reader to have these different experiences and different statuses, like you said, and how the different challenges are associated with each of those. And I'd love to know what is your hope for when readers finish Infinite Country? What do you hope that they walk away with?

Well, it's hard to say because I don't believe that a writer should be like dictatorial and tell a reader what they should feel about anything. I certainly don't enjoy that feeling when I'm reading a book, what I aim for in anything that I write or create is to create an experience, to create something that imitates life in one way or another to the point where a reader feels that they have met people that they have not met before. And of course, when you meet anybody, the question is, are you going to care about them or not? Right? If you meet a stranger on the street, are you going to just shove them out of your way or are you going to maybe look at them as if they're a human being with their own desires and troubles? So my hope for anybody on this planet is that they have a degree, they possess a degree of compassion. But I don't write with an agenda to try to tell a reader what they should feel.

Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. And so you're collaborating with the National Endowment of the Arts for this big read program. And I'm really excited that we have this opportunity to have you visit Hall County on Monday, September 11. That's going to be at the Hall County Library. And Tia, I'd love to bring you into the conversation and speak to you mentioned that, of course, there's many stories of immigration here in Hall County itself and that this is an excellent book to open up for discussion with the community. And I'm wondering, Tia, what do you hope to come out of the author meet and greet on September 11 and what kind of conversations would you like to see facilitated there?

Well, I really like what Patricia said about not having an agenda and telling the reader what they should feel, because that's really our whole goal with our community conversations, is not to change anybody's perspective, but to give them a new lens to look through so they can think about things differently. And I hope that that goal is met through all of the discussions that are going on in the community. We have at least six book discussions. Two of them are going on at the library and ung, their College of Education is making this a required read for their third and fourth year students, I believe. And if we can get the funding to purchase more, it'll be for all years in the College of Education. So we're hopeful about that. So I'm hoping that we'll have a lot of people come and be knowledgeable about the book and be ready for a rich discussion and be able to open mindedly listen to what Patricia has to share.

Absolutely. Well, Patricia, thank you so much for sharing your story, your family's background, and especially the story of how you were inspired to write Infinite Country. Again. Folks can meet Patricia Ingle on Monday, September 11. That's going to be from six to 08:00 P.m at the Downtown Hall County Library. You can purchase a book, get it signed, meet Patricia. And again, I think we're going to have a really great discussion that's awesome for this community. And this time and again, thank you so much for allowing us to also reflect on how all of us, at some point, even back in ancient history, we're immigrants in some way. Well, like you said, we're always exploring, always moving, and always connecting. So, Patricia, thank you so much for sharing your insights and your story. And Tia, thank you so much for facilitating this event.

Thanks. Thank you so much. Liba, Tia, I'm looking forward to seeing you in Hall County very soon.

Thank you. You too.

Then again is a production of the Northeast Georgia History Center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast is edited by media producer Juada Rodriguez. Our digital and on site programs are made possible by the Ada May Ivester Education Center. Please join us next week for another episode of Then Again.