A New Connection with America

"As an immigrant, there’s a little part of you that always says, 'Well, I’m not a hundred percent American.' America is some other little boy or some other place I haven’t been to yet. What was transformative was...realizing that the quest for home and identity had always been part of my work, but that I’d been home all along. I understood that my story, my mother’s story, the story of those hundreds of thousands of people up there, is America. I had the dawning of a new connection with America, a new love affair. Not a blind patriotism, but just an understanding that it is part of who I am."

- Richard Blanco, Poet
   Interview with Guernica