A Journey Around Our America: A Memoir of Cycling, Immigration, and the Latinoization of the U.S.

Deeply troubled by the gathering backlash against Latino immigration in recent years, Mendoza, a Mexican-American academic (Univ. of Minn.) and author (Crossing into America), took his outrage on the road, crossing the continent over five months in 2007 in an attempt to gain insight into the experience of Latinos from shore to shore. Choosing a bike over a car was a way to get in shape during his sabbatical year, though cycling also proved a key to gaining trust among the people he needed to meet: the often shunned, invisible, disenfranchised immigrant workers who made the shops, factories, fields, mines, and dairies run every day. From Santa Cruz, Calif., he headed northward in July, toward Eugene, Ore., then due east, hitting his midway point of Minneapolis six weeks later. Then, from Chicago and Detroit he traveled to Boston and New York, then pressing down the coast to Florida and across to Houston, Tex., where his family lived. He offers reflections from his blog on the personal toll the arduous journey took, and records interviews with many of the locals he met and who offered him acts of kindness. The snapshots of these myriad lives are relevant and moving. (Oct.)