The Immigrant Perspective

Episode 10: Home Depends on Who I’m Talking To

Frank is the only American-born member of our family, and the one who had to figure out how to become an immigrant in reverse. A conversation about names, leaving, and what home really means.

Episode 9: Home is Where I Am

What does home mean when you've lived in two countries, moved around a lot, and built a life far from where you started? For my younger sister, Laurie, the answer is simple: home is just where she is. Laurie was seven when the Mangan family left Kilkee, a small beach town on the west coast of Ireland, and landed in Southeast Tennessee. She is the youngest of five siblings, and her immigrant experience may be the most quietly radical of all of them. She doesn't romanticize Ireland. She doesn't feel particularly nostalgic. And she hasn't been back since 2009. In this conversation, the sisters talk about what they each remember from those final weeks in Ireland, arriving in the American South for the first time, being picked on at school for their accents and their short hair, and the very different ways they've each made sense of leaving a country they didn't choose to leave. Also: a stink bomb, a potential house buyer, and one sister hiding behind a bathroom door while the other took the fall.

Episode 8: Last Man Out, Turn Off the Lights

Siobhan Duff didn't choose to leave Newfoundland. The economy made that decision for her. When Canada closed the cod fishery in the early 1990s, an entire province's livelihood disappeared overnight. Siobhan, a newly minted physician, and her husband Jim, a residential builder, found themselves with no viable path forward at home. So they left. Thirty years later, they're still in Chattanooga. Leaving now, Siobhan says, would feel like a loss in its own right.

Episode 7: We Were Told We Were Going to Disneyland

Laura Contreras-Alanis arrived in the United States in 1974 - a little girl from Michoacán, Mexico, told she was going to Disneyland. What followed was anything but a fairy tale: migrant farm work in Central California, multiple moves as a teenager, dropping out of high school, a painful estrangement from her family, and eventually - decades later - a U-Haul headed to Knoxville, Tennessee, with five kids, a terrified-of-flying husband, and a grandmother's passing along the way. In this conversation, Laura shares the full arc: the privileged childhood in Mexico where everyone knew her name, the culture shock of apartment life in California, the years she spent deliberately distancing herself from her Mexican identity as a form of self-protection, and the slow, tender return to her roots. She talks about the "un trastorno princesa" her sister teases her about, the brother who simply got out of the car in Knoxville one day and never went back to California, and what it means to become a citizen by choice - not by default. Laura is warm, funny, and searingly honest. This one stays with you.

Episode 6: The MacMenamins - Three Countries, One Home

Hugh and Kathleen MacMenamin have lived in the United States for over 55 years, but ask them where home is, and they'll tell you Ireland. In this episode, we trace their journey from post-war Belgium to Dublin to Duluth, through medical school, internships, residencies, five children, and 14 grandchildren. Kathleen shares what it was like to grow up Flemish in Dublin, including the time she was called a "foreign pest" at school. Hugh talks about the professor who told his medical class that half of them would have to leave Ireland just to find work. Together, they reflect on the America they chose in 1969 and what it means to love a country that keeps changing around you.