Richard Boudreaux, who grew up in Baton Rouge and has worked as an international correspondent for the likes of The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal during his nearly 40-year career, ponders just what it means to be “home” in a new column for The Wall Street Journal, where he serves as the Madrid bureau chief.
“What is home? The question has pursued me around the world for more than half my life,” writes Boudreaux, who has made his home in eight different countries since leaving the U.S. in 1977. “Some expats go native and settle outside their own land. I have yet to feel the call. Instead, I’ve become a professional nomad: I land, study the language, try to blend in, make friends, butt heads with the bureaucracy, struggle to make sense of the place, and tell its stories to the rest of the world. Then, nudged by editors who prefer correspondents with fresh eyes, I move on.”
Still, Boudreaux says, he’s tried to cling to his roots in south Louisiana.
“I enjoy visiting my parents and lifelong friends in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” he writes. “But the family long ago outgrew my childhood home and sold it, just as I moved beyond Baton Rouge and fell for big, cosmopolitan cities.”
Ultimately, Boudreaux writes, his incessant traveling has made him someone who “can make myself at home almost anywhere, yet nowhere feels completely home.”
“I feel a weird nostalgia for these ‘homes,’” he writes of all of the varied places he’s called home. “But I never fully belonged. Never felt completely secure in Mexico and Russia, never cracked the Italian tribal code. My people, the Louisiana Cajuns, never had a claim to the Holy Land.” Read the full column.
