Holiday Gift Guide: Spotlight on Immigrant Voices

Whichever winter holidays you celebrate, this next list has gift ideas you will be sure to love. Here you’ll find books that amplify the voices of refugees and immigrants, both real and fictional. You’ll also find products and businesses that have meaningful stories to tell, created as they were out of the passion, talent, and hard work of immigrants from around the world.

Through image-rich poems regarding migration, transcultural identity, loss, connection, dream, and aging — some translingual, some ekphrastic responses to ephemeral and surreal works of art — Brenda Cárdenas’ Trace explores conditions of displacement, liminality, and mutability. These poems transgress illusory borders between lands, languages, humans and the rest of the natural world, waking and dreaming, and the living and the dead as they unearth traces of experience that shape and haunt us, traces we leave behind for others to encounter. Although elegy resurfaces throughout this collection as does a poetics of social consciousness, Cárdenas also embraces moments of levity, story, and an effervescent internal music that balance her steps through fraught yet bewitching terrain.

For more info visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

A Plucked Zither explores what happens to language and thus emotions and relationships under conditions of migration, specifically refugee migration from Vietnam and its aftermath. Crisscrossing between making a home in the US and home in Vietnam, the speaker tries nonlinear, multilingual voice(s) that demonstrate the disparate nature of memory and the operation of other ways of knowing. Efforts to speak reflect the severing created by historical forces of war and imperialism, while speaking makes connection possible and remains tied to that very history. Vuong leans on the anti-war Vietnamese singer and songwriter, Trịnh Công Sơn, for a poetic lineage on grief, longing, and justice. Rather than being sunken with loss, the speaker(s) move with it, leaping across gaps.

For more info visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

A grieving Hector Peterson and his estranged father Winston Telemacque arrive on the lush island of Dominica in 2017 to spread his mother’s ashes when Hurricane Maria strikes. Amid the devastation, the fragile peace between father and son is tested as long-buried family secrets at the heart of Hector’s identity are unearthed. Hector faces down his failed marriage, shipwrecked career, and his own failures as a father, while Winston, after three decades of striving as an immigrant in Boston, seeks to reclaim the losses from a painful childhood and the bloody betrayal by his one true love. In Island Man, the ruins of past and present are reconciled and shattered generational bonds are restored.

For more info visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

In The Good Deed, Helen Benedict offers a stark, powerful portrait of women on opposite sides of a refugee camp in Greece: the refugees trapped inside, and the troubled American tourist whose good intentions morph into a dangerous delusion, resulting in a poignant, layered novel on displacement and belonging, love and betrayal, and the jagged space between altruism and egoism.

Drawing from four years of interviews with refugees on Samos, along with twelve previous years of work on the Iraq War, Benedict has written The Good Deed as a series of lyrical, intensely felt alternating voices, following these women’s everyday lives in the camp, as well each of their backstories — stories of families, love, secrets, violence, war, and flight. When Hilma, the American, unwittingly does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

In essence, The Good Deed is about the struggle never to lose hope, even in the face of war and the world’s hostility to refugees; the complexities that arise out of trying to help others; the healing power of friendship; and the everlasting bonds between mothers and children.

For more info visit Red Hen, and to pre-order click here.

Put a little flavor and spice in your loved one’s stocking with these hot sauces and seasonings from Fly by Jing. This company was created in 2018, inspired by the flavors of the founder’s hometown Chengdu, her desire to reconnect with her roots, and her passion for sharing her culture with others.

Available for purchase here.

For the coffee lover in your life, be sure to check out Mostra. Mostra is a women, minority, veteran, and immigrant-owned micro coffee roaster based out of north county San Diego. With their gifts, passion, and shared Filipino heritage combined, the four friends who founded this company are determined to serve coffee with a mission. From starting a business and investing in their local community to helping farmers around the globe build generational wealth for their families, they take pride in creating coffee for their customers that no only tastes good but does good.

Available for purchase here.

This year, instead of generic bath bombs and chemical-heavy scented soaps, consider giving beauty products from Iber. Pronounced ee-bair, “iber” is a statement meaning “you are beautiful” in the language of the Luo people, a proud Nilotic tribe from East Africa. When one exclaims “Iber!”, they capture the joy and wonder that natural beauty can inspire.

This company’s founder has a passion for sharing the knowledge of African beauty and culture with the African diaspora and the world at large. The 100% natural ingredients in their hair and skin care products are chosen in honor of ancient knowledge passed down from their ancestors.

Available for purchase here.

According to a recent survey, almost 70% of people give candles as gifts. This year you can give a candle that really stands out by choosing a Properity Candle. This company was founded in 2009, by three like-minded friends who wanted to create opportunities for women artisans escaping conflict. Today they make candles, spa products, gift sets and more, employing women artisans building a brighter future for themselves in the U.S. after living for years as refugees. And they help to support refugee families around the world as well.

Available for purchase here.

What do you get the person who already has everything? The gift of helping those who don’t. Consider making a contribution to The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). This non-profit was founded in 1986 and is a California leader with national impact, made of diverse immigrant families and individuals who act as agents of social change to achieve a world with freedom of mobility, full human rights, and true participatory democracy. CHIRLA’s mission is to achieve a just society fully inclusive of immigrants.

Click here to make a donation in honor of someone you love.