When Jason DeParle moved into the Manila slums with Tita Comodas and her family three decades ago, he never imagined his reporting on them would span three generations and turn into the defining chronicle of the age of global migration. DeParle paints an intimate portrait of a family as they endure years of sacrifice and separation, willing themselves out of shantytown poverty into a new global middle class.
This ambitious and successful book profiles an extended Filipino family inching toward prosperity by laboring out of country for years, migrating to do arduous work in harsh places. It’s the opposite of an instant book; it has been cooking for three decades. The chef has combined, in considered proportion, ingredients gathered around the world—revealing family and work scenes set in the Philippines, Oman and Saudi Arabia, aboard wandering cruise ships and deep in the heart of Texas. And right when we’re hungry for them, he serves up telling social and economic digressions that place the family’s struggles in a political and economic context of global migration ... DeParle has a frank, amiable and plain-spoken virtuosity as a writerA Good Provider Is One Who Leaves deserves a place on the same high shelf as Kate Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers—recent books that enrapture readers with moving narrative while elegantly elucidating deep, humane and informed understandings of poverty and conflict. These books represent the highest and most powerful use of the oft-read but rarely identified genre of narrative journalism.
...[an] indispensable book, a Baedeker to an unnoticed and largely unappreciated global phenomenon, and a guide to understanding not only the flow of people worldwide but also the tensions that infuse politics worldwide. This may be a portrait of Tita’s world, but it is also the portrait of the world today—a world, DeParle shows us, that is in profound transformation as millions seek to better their lives ... In these pages DeParle offers us a brisk history of immigration and immigration policy and wise reflections on contemporary migration ... he’s a historian in seeing the process with a centuries-long perspective...but is a journalist with a reporter’s eye on contemporary events, seeing how corruption, poverty, and violence spur great waves of migration.
A Good Provider... [adds] geopolitical and historical dimension to current discussions of migration and nationalism, while never straying far from the story of a single family dispersed by the pressure to survive and provide for its members. In the process, DeParle highlights a significant but often overlooked group: migrants who make the journey legally ... The Portaganas’ lives are at once ordinary and extraordinary, laced with as many contradictions as the ancient rite and modern disrupter that is migration itself ... DeParle’s understanding of migration is refreshingly cleareyed and nuanced ... One of the few places where DeParle’s reporting falters is in his explanation of his role in this story ... DeParle invokes many of his own actions and motives with only the briefest of explanations ... By focusing on legal migration, A Good Provider avoids the politicized discussions of children in detention, undocumented farmworkers and the so-called Dreamers...And yet, by delineating the conditions that allow Rosalie and her family to succeed in the United States, DeParle draws a portrait starkly at odds with the experience of the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants who call this country home, many of whom have lived and worked here much longer.
