Running Thousands of Miles in Search of Yourself

Nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. SPIRIT RUN A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen LandBy Noé Álvarez In a 1979 address at Brown University, Ralph Ellison called cultural exchange an American inevitability, the logical outcome of the waves of movement and migration that formed the country. His parents, who had been born in South Carolina and Georgia, understood how the arbitrary borders of the Mason-Dixon line, the 49th parallel and the Mississippi River defined the limits on their freedom. By the early 1900s they had moved west, to Oklahoma, then a “relatively unformed frontier state.

” Ellison said they understood the extent to which “geography has performed the role of fate. ” Some 140 miles southeast of Seattle sits Yakima, a fertile desert city of 94,000 known for its apples, wine and hops. First inhabited by the Yakama people, the town grew as waves of workers washed in over the centuries — white, Japanese and, eventually, Mexican, who began arriving in the 1940s with the advent of warehousing and corporatized farming. As the 20th century wore on, Central Americans arrived, too, urged along by economic collapse and political destabilization at home.

The poet and short story writer Raymond Carver, son of a sawmill worker, grew up in Yakima and drew heavily on the town’s grittiness to enrich his stories of desolation. So did Noé Álvarez, whose lyrical if uneven debut book, “Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land” — part travelogue, part traditional memoir — comes face to face with the many strands of his inheritance, revisiting Carver territory while treading a new path. In Yakima, “a paradise on the surface,” white families live on the town’s west side while a growing Latino population concentrates on the east. Álvarez’s mother was born in the Mexican state of Michoacán.

At 15, she fled to the United States and has worked for decades in fruit production and distribution centers. It’s thankless and grueling work. ICE agents lurk, shift leaders menace. Álvarez tallies the physical toll on his mother’s body — her knee deformities, her eroding posture, the disfigurement wrought by tendinitis in the joints of her fingers.

His father, “a spirit born of hunger” descended from Indigenous Purépecha, was born in unmapped Mexican territory and hunted birds and iguanas for food when he was young. He made the trek north at 16, working for a time in the hop fields in Washington, before being deported and returning stateside with the help of a coyote. The story of the striving, first-generation kid made good is a familiar one; Álvarez makes his ache. He excels in honors classes and is aware from a young age of a yearning to free his mother from “the assault of the fruit industry.