Postcards from Home

Abstract

This project explores how children of immigrants in the United States understand and carry the places their parents are from. Drawing on a series of in‐depth ethnographic interviews with students whose families immigrated from Guatemala, El Salvador, India, and Romania, this work translates shared narratives into a collection of prose poems. Participants were asked about their parents' early lives, their own relationships to language, memory, and family stories, and how they make sense of inherited histories. The interviews revealed a common inheritance of love, pain, memory, and silence—an inheritance that shapes identity formation and cultural belonging. Each poem in Postcards from Home reimagines these narratives in a creative form, using lyric language to trace themes of longing, resilience, cultural navigation, and intergenerational memory. This collection contributes to the growing body of literature that resists reducing immigrant identity to narratives of either trauma or triumph, instead honoring its contradictions, ambiguities, and intimacies.