Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America's Stolen Land | Noe Alvarez
The electrifying debut memoir of a son of working-class Mexican immigrants who fled a life of labor in fruit-packing plants to run in an Indigenous marathon from Canada to Guatemala, reimagining North America and his place in it Growing up in Yakima, Washington, No lvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother, who slouched over a conveyor belt of fruit, shoulder to shoulder with mothers conditioned to believe this was all they could do with their lives. A university scholarship offered escape, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, lvarez struggled to fit in. At nineteen, he learned about a Native American/First Nations movement called the Peace and Dignity Journeys, epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across North America. He dropped out of school and joined a group of Den, Secwpemc, Gitxsan, Dakelh, Apache, Tohono Oodham, Seri, Purpecha, and Maya runners, all fleeing difficult beginnings. Telling their stories alongside his own, lvarez writes about a four-month-long journey from Canada to Guatemala that pushed him to his limits. He writes not only of overcoming hunger, thirst, and feardangers included stone-throwing motorists and a mountain lionbut also of asserting Indigenous and working-class humanity in a capitalist society where oil extraction, deforestation, and substance abuse wreck communities. Running through mountains, deserts, and cities, and through the Mexican territory his parents left behind, lvarez forges a new relationship with the land, and with the act of running, carrying with him the knowledge of his parents migration, andagainst all odds in a society that exploits his body and rejects his spiritthe dream of a liberated future.
Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America's Stolen Land | 
pick
bailed
