“BEYOND Facts: AMOR AND EXILE by Nathaniel Hoffman and Nicole Salgado” By Karen Degroot Carter, Sustenance for the Socially Conscious, July 17, 2014
“The Sunday Rumpus Feature: Love and Immigration in Amor and Exile by Hoffman and Salgado” By ALLISON CAY PARKER, The Rumpus,
“Love in the Time of Deportation and Many More Heart-Wrenching Stories,“ Teresa Statler, AILA Voice (Reader’s Corner, pg. 17), September/October 2013 issue
Review from Ellin Jimmerson, PhD from April 2013:
“I thought I knew in broad strokes everything there was to know about illegal immigration until my path crossed that of Nicole Salgado and other women who have followed their deported husbands into exile. I was wrong. Salgado and her co-author of Amor and Exile, journalist Nathaniel Hoffman, have provided me and others who care about illegal immigration in all its harsh complexity another “dot” that needs to be brought into clear focus and connected to all the other dots on the immigration spectrum including free trade agreements, migrant deaths, and the United States’ burgeoning for-profit prison system.
In her compelling, spare prose style, Salgado introduces us to her Mexican husband, Margo, and to the adjustments their love in exile has required of them both. Hoffman broadens the cast of characters to Susie and Roberto, Carlos and Beth, Ben and Deyanira, Juan and Veronica, and J.W. and Gabriel, a same-sex couple. None of them set out to fall in love with someone who had no lawful status in the US, but they did. None intended to face the agonizing decision to follow their loved one into a more or less permanent exile, but that is what happened.
Salgado and Hoffman do more than sketch personal stories. They do more than ask Americans to consider the humanity of illegal immigrants. What they do engagingly and significantly is ask Americans to consider what it means to be an American who loses his or her political voice, who technically becomes a legal stranger, who lives for indefinite periods in personal and political limbo–all because she or he fell in love.
Hoffman asks [us] to consider that the reality of love in exile does not square with Americans’ (erroneous) understanding that the immigration system is wide open to family members, our genuine regard for families, and our deep cultural belief in marrying for romantic reasons.
Amor and Exile is important, timely, and deserves a wide readership.”
Ellin Jimmerson, Ph.D., is a published historian and theologian, Minister to the Community at Weatherly Heights Baptist Church, a full-time migrant advocate and popular speaker on illegal immigration, and an award-winning film maker. Represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, she is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Alabama’s Governor Robert Bentley, et. al. over HB 56, Alabama’s harsh anti-immigrant law. Her migrant justice documentary, The Second Cooler / La Segunda Nevera, narrated by Martin Sheen, is currently screening at film festivals. She has written a platform for Comprehensive Migrant Justice which can be found on her movie website www.thesecondcooler.com/writings.