Infinite Country is my fourth book, but it emerged from my heart unlike anything I’ve written before.
It began as a sort of love letter to not only my family, but to all the families who see bits of themselves reflected in these characters: families who’ve left one homeland to begin a life in another country; families who’ve been separated by time and borders; families who found themselves estranged and families in which the members love each other so much that they would sacrifice almost anything, and even keep silent about their greatest heartaches and sorrows, just to spare each other an ounce of suffering.
Infinite Country shows how one family struggles to remain connected across time, distance and uncertainty, for reasons that are completely beyond their control.
I am the daughter of Colombians. Immigrants are my community, my beloveds and my heroes. I wanted to write a story that spoke to the love within all families in a kaleidoscopic way: the love between two young sweethearts who become parents together; the love between a parent and a child, the love between siblings, the love between a person and their ancestral homeland and the place where they make their chosen home, and how these relationships transform over time and place and take on new texture and dimension over generations.
When writing this book, there is no way I could have imagined that it would be published during a period when we are entering the second year of a global pandemic that has left so many families separated indefinitely. Infinite Country shows how one family struggles to remain connected across time, distance and uncertainty, for reasons that are completely beyond their control. It’s not unlike the uncertainty we, as a nation, have been facing for the past year, when many are unable to visit their loved ones who may even live in the same city or the same state. And perhaps this is the first time the average American citizen has gotten a sense of what it is like to have borders closed to them, when the majority of nations have closed their doors to us for fear of the negative effect we might have on their owns populations. I hope readers might now, with a broadened sense of compassion, see the parallels between our collective pandemic experience, and the limitations immigrant families endure year after year.
It’s what pushes people to migrate in search of better resources, to challenge themselves, to work hard and thrive in the face of hardship and have faith in a better tomorrow.
Infinite County is the story of a family in the process of emigrating, which is an ever-evolving condition, and one that is the story of nearly every family in the United States, whether it was in this generation or a dozen generations ago. I hope readers can take away that love is really the greatest motivator in this world. It’s what pushes people to migrate in search of better resources, to challenge themselves, to work hard and thrive in the face of hardship and have faith in a better tomorrow. It transcends borders and illness and quarantines. Love, more anything else, is the common thread that runs through all peoples on this planet and unites us as a species.
