Chris’s Pick
December 2020
American Dirt
Jeanine Cummins
This whole disturbing year has been a non-stop reading event for me, and probably for you. Although I would not wish to repeat any part of the quarantine experience, the upside has been the reading and discovery of dozens of truly excellent books by either new, or comfortingly familiar, authors. But after cataloging all I have read in 2020, I came back to this one to review.
American Dirt begins with the terrifying massacre of an extended Mexican family at a Quinceanera celebration. Lydia’s husband, a journalist, has infuriated the head of a powerful cartel, provoking this deadly retribution. Hearts pounding, we watch as only Lydia and her eight-year-old son, Luca, narrowly escape the gunmen by hiding in a bathroom. As the cartel continues to search the city for them, Lydia at first turns to old friends for help. But realizing that she has now put her friends in grave danger as well, Lydia determines that their escape must be by her wits alone.
We are then taken on a harrowing journey in the flight from Mexico to reach the safety of “American dirt”. Lydia is used to a comfortable middle-class existence and has some means at her disposal. But as they have escaped without papers or passports and must protect their digital identity from the far-reaching cartel, Lydia and Luca join the masses of migrants heading north. They meet young sisters, who are escaping their own personal horrors, and a couple of other misfits who join their small band. They learn how to jump onto, and ride on the top of, La Bestia, the train on which hundreds of migrants die each year. They encounter corrupt police officers and gangs who lie in wait, anticipating the arrival of vulnerable migrants. Finally, they end up in Nogales, where they must cross the desert by foot and at night with a hired coyote to arrive in the United States.
I read this book in January, when it was first released, and it has haunted me since. It was almost impossible to put down. Cummins writes in a straight-forward fashion, keeping the narrative swift and unrelenting. Besides keeping me up at night to read “just one more page”, it was a profoundly moving experience. The book is clearly designed as a moral message to bring an understanding of migrants’ plight and to put faces to the nameless. In the afterward of the book, Jeanine Cummins details the five-year research project that resulted in American Dirt, and her intention “to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear…”
However, this book has become wildly controversial, receiving a great deal of negative press and condemnation because Jeanine Cummins is neither a migrant nor is she Mexican. Her book tour was canceled; she received threats of violence. Lauren Groff writes in The New York Times, “In contemporary literary circles, there is a serious and legitimate sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant.” This is an argument I understand, especially in our current culture where everything is politicized.
However, it is clear that the intended audience for this story is not the migrants, nor even, I think, the Latinx population, but for people like me who have never experienced this desperation or fear, and who are worried about what is happening at our Southern border. If our eyes can be opened a bit, or if it nudges us towards a greater understanding and empathy, then I feel the book has value.
American Dirt is also a story of love, the love a mother has for her child and the extremes she might go to to protect and ensure a better life for him. Mostly though, it is just a terrific story, and terrific stories are always worth reading.