Summary From the First Encounter between Europeans and American Indians on the shores of Newfoundland to contemporary accounts of young people coming out as undocumented immigrants across the country, Takaki relates the stories of those who helped create our multicultural nation. He introduces us to individuals like J. W. Loguen, a black slave who escaped to Canada in the nineteenth century, asserting his freedom in a letter to his former owners after they demanded payment for the property he'd ''stolen'' from them: his body. We meet six-year-old Ignacio Pi a, a Mexican American boy wrongfully deported to Mexico in 1931 who successfully proved his US citizenship sixteen years later. We hear about the journeys of Ai Miyasaki and Riyo Orite, ''picture brides'' who abandoned everything in their native Japan and came to the United States to meet unknown husbands in an unknown country.