American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

AMERICAN DIRT by Jeanine Cummins is my favorite book of this young year. A harrowing story of flight that I could not put down, Cummins’ title has also received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. Yet, this tale of a young Mexican mother, Lydia, trying to flee the cartel with her eight-year-old son, Luca, has also produced quite a bit of controversy.  One side (how can someone who is not Mexican tell this story?) appeared in The New York Times. Lauren Groff acknowledges feeling “deeply ambivalent” in her recent review.  Whereas Kathleen Parker (herself no stranger to controversy) argues that critics are censoring the author based on her background in today’s Washington Post.  I agree and wish that we were focused instead on Cummins’ beautiful writing and on the dangers and violence South of the US border. Interest in and requests for AMERICAN DIRT are high and we will need multiple copies, allowing our readers to make their own evaluations, and hopefully changing perspectives as Cummins wishes, saying, “We seldom think of them [migrants and refugees] as our fellow human beings. … people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.”

AMERICAN DIRT should be considered as a possible addition to the curriculum (perhaps replacing La Linea or Enrique’s Journey for some classes), especially given our work on equity issues this year.  Cummins is relentless in describing the fear that Lydia and Luca experience: “Lydia’s worried about so many things she can’t pin one down to examine it.  She’s worried about being out in the open like this, about being recognized. Whenever someone looks at her and then looks at their cell phone, there’s a little racehorse of adrenaline that clobbers through her body.” Pairing this new work with novels by Latinx writers*, perhaps including the non-fiction text My Time Among The Whites by Jennine Capó Crucet, has the potential to build empathy and to generate some amazing conversations. In her author’s note, Cummins explains that she “hoped to present one of those unique personal stories – a work of fiction – as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear.”

*Cummins acknowledges and recommends reading the works of Luis Alberto Urrea, Oscar Martinez, Sonia Nazario, Jennifer Clement, Valeria Luiselli, and Reyna Grande, all of whom are in our collection.