The Beginning of Leaving

Elsa Valmidiano's The Beginning of Leaving is a hybrid collection of journalistic prose and lyrical essays, weaving a personal examination of how leaving not only reflects a picture of immigration and the diaspora, but how migration through generations compels any individual to honor the Motherland we left behind, and acknowledge whose land we now inhabit and have adopted as our own. In these essays, leaving is not simply a finite act but a process of resistance, reconciliation, and release-from