Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer writer with many successful books behind him that I’ve never read, but that I will definitely add to my wishlist after reading his newest release « Our Migrant Souls » (already available to purchase).

In this informative yet emotional essay, Tobar brings the reader around the United States both geographically and historically speaking, uncovering and dismantling the meaning and myths of being “Latino” today, but also of notions so commonly used as “race” and “ethnicity”. He does so not through the sterility of definitions, numbers, or statistics, but through history and most importantly through people and their stories.

This essay is short, yet it effectively showcases the global condition of “the migrant” while not stripping the migration experience of its multiplicity of experiences. He places people’s experiences at the center of the paradox of the migrant in the United States: constantly needed yet constantly mistreated. While it is an essay centered on the USA context, I felt that many concepts and reflections expressed in the essay apply to the universal migrant experience, and I could not avoid thinking about how the same paradoxes apply to migrants in Italy (my country).

« "Ethnicity" and “race" are sold to us as boxes containing our skin tones and our surnames, but the truth about you, about us, will not fit in any box. »