With the migrant crisis on our southern border boiling over, I’ve been thinking about the only novel I’ve read with illegal immigration as its setting.
That book is American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. Our Magee Books-n-Lunch Club read it in 2022, two years after President Biden came into office and opened the floodgates on America’s border with Mexico.
The plot opens in the resort city of Acapulco, Mexico, where Lydia Quixano is a comfortably middle class bookstore owner. At the bookstore, she meets a kind, sensitive-seeming customer, Javier Fuentes, who visits often to discuss books and begins to occupy more and more of Lydia’s thoughts.
Her husband Sebastian is a journalist who publishes an expose on her friend Javier, who is revealed as the head of a deadly drug cartel, Los Jardineros. After the story comes out, Lydia’s whole family comes to her home for a birthday party, and Lydia steps inside for a moment, where she witnesses cartel membersgunning them all down in the yard. Only she and her 8-year-old son Luca survive.
Realizing that their lives are in danger, Lydia sees that they must flee the country and somehow join the flow of migrants north to America.
Along the way, they meet two Honduran teenaged girls who have been targeted by gangs in their own country and are trying to get away to Maryland, where they have a cousin. The girls show Lydia and Luca how to jump on and ride the roof of La Bestia, a freight train going north. It’s a dangerous, terrifying trip during which Lydia and the young people must evade immigration officials, Border Patrol, an gang informer, armed vigilantes, and the coyotes they must pay to get them across the border.
They finally arrive on “American dirt” and make it to their destination. But life in America is not entirely welcoming to the newcomers. Though she is well-educated, Lydia can only find work as a cleaner, and Luca can go to school but, as an undocumented alien, is not eligible for all of its programs.
American Dirt was touted as the next great thing when Cummins submitted it for publication in 2018. After a bidding war, Flatiron Books paid her a seven figure advance for the rights to it and published it in 2020, after which it hit all kinds of best-seller lists. It was selected for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club on January 20, 2020.
Then, due to heavy criticism, several bookstores cancelled Cummins author appearances. Flatiron cancelled the book on January 29, 2020.
Critics began to say that a white, European-born woman in the United States had “no right” to author a book about the Mexican migrant experience. Other critics said it was “unfair” of the publishers to pay a fortune for a book by a non-Latino writer about an experience she never had and to pass over the many Latino writers with better books.
Cummins tries to justify her right to author a book on the migrant experience by saying that her own husband is an undocumented alien. Apparently that connection didn’t satisfy the critics.
The author’s right to write was not my objection to the book. Though it is a fascinating and gripping read and probably a fairly accurate account of what some migrants experience, I objected to its premise — that entry into the United States is too hard, even life threatening, and should be made easier. Making it easier would require making it legal and almost without conditions — which is about the point we’ve reached on the border now.
Lydia, Luca and the girls are written as sympathetic characters that readers identify with and hope will succeed in arriving on “American dirt” because they are good people who have done absolutely nothing wrong. Javier, his gang members and unscrupulous coyotes are painted as evil opponents. But then, so are unwelcoming Americans and the immigration officials and Border Patrol officers whose job it is to stop illegal immigration.
That point of view means that the author wants us to believe that all migrants are fine people who are only fleeing persecution and have no evil intentions. Sorry, that’s just not true.
Illegal immigration is a complex problem. Part of it is caused by the drug cartels and gangs taking over other countries, such as we’ve just seen in Haiti. Part of it is caused by America’s appetite for the drugs that the cartels are sending across the border. Part of it is caused by politics.
The answer is not the porous border that we have now that’s letting in oppressed and oppressor alike.
But for all of its controversy, do put American Dirt under your reading lamp soon and decide for yourself.
