Remembering where we come from

It’s June. I look out my office window and watch the baby robins in a tree only six feet away. The young birds squawk and rock at the edge of their nest as they consider taking their first flight. Later, I tend the garden, amazed by the almost visible daily growth of the raspberry and tomato plants. I make dinner and wash the dishes after eating. I walk along the creek, the water rising as the snow melts in the mountains above town. This is the shape of daily life for me in Wyoming. 

And yet the broader world is always present. Migration is one of the most obvious ways I feel this. Some 57.4% of Wyomingites were born outside the state, according to the five-year American Community Survey. With a total 2024 US Census population of 587,618, this means that 337,292 of us have moved here from somewhere else. While the leading sources of newcomers are the states of Colorado, California, Utah and Nebraska, the 2024 census also shows that 3.5% of Wyomingites were born outside the country. That’s 20,566 of us who are first-generation Americans. The largest numbers of our immigrant neighbors have come from Mexico, China and Canada, but many other countries have contributed to Wyoming’s population. Indeed, aside from the original Native peoples, we are migrants from the entire planet.

I first came to Wyoming in 1984 and have now lived here for more than half my life. But I was born in Oregon and raised in Arizona. I attended school in those two states along with Texas and Iowa. I’ve worked extensively in Alaska, Washington and Montana, with shorter-term jobs in New York, Arkansas and Illinois. I’ve also lived and worked in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, India, Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua and the Basque Country. Then there was my very brief stint as an undocumented worker on a landscape gardening crew in British Columbia.

In coming to Wyoming, I felt I’d come to a new country, a place with people whose experience, different from my own, would enrich my life. I wonder if my sense of displacement, coupled with the pleasure I’ve taken in my new home in Wyoming, arose from my family’s immigration history, a history of constant motion, of longing to be settled.

One of my great-grandmothers on my mother’s side was a Sephardic Jew who fled the Iberian Peninsula for Amsterdam, then a haven for Jews. Rather than stay in Amsterdam, though, she went north to Norway, where she married into a family of Lutheran ministers and farmers who wrote poetry and ran a newspaper on the side. My great-grandfather, who did all four of these things, took especially seriously his role as a small-town journalist, writing on behalf of Norwegian independence from Sweden. In danger of arrest for his opinions, he and his family left for the United States, landing in Minnesota, where many Scandinavians already lived. 

His son, my grandfather, moved on, saying of Minnesota’s winters, “If I’d wanted to stay in Norway, I would have.” He went to Texas but was uncomfortable there, too. “Too hot,” he said and headed farther west, to live on the Oregon coast in a Bellamy Colony, a rural experiment in communal life with shared property and labor.

My father’s mother was born in Victoria, British Columbia shortly after her Belgian Catholic family arrived there. She claims her birth was on the boat as it sat moored in the inner harbor. Over time, more people from both sides of the family immigrated, almost all of them ending up in British Columbia, Washington, or Oregon, so as a kid I felt both and neither Canadian and American.

My parents served in WWII — my mother as a Women’s Army Corps clerk and my father as an Army Air Corps tail gunner in a B-25 medium range bomber. Twice injured, he spent 11 months in a Greenville, South Carolina, hospital undergoing reconstructive facial surgery. When I was a small child, he moved our family to southern Arizona seeking relief from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. I grew up there in mixed Anglo and Chicano communities and schools. My classmates were largely Mexican Americans whose family roots often dated back to the time before the US invasion of Mexico in 1845 and the appropriation of over one-third of Mexico’s national territory. Once upon a time, Arizona was Mexico. Moving here, I remembered that in those days, a small sliver of southern Wyoming was part of Mexico, too.

That’s the condensed history of my American family, a family shaped by flight and arrival, seeking to find a home. And that’s where I’d like to end — having come to Wyoming and made a life here, a life shaped both by the unique history of this place and by the broader history it shares with the country and the world.