I’m glad I ignored the controversy over American Dirt when it was released in 2020. Very glad that it didn’t stop me from reading it or taint my reaction to this heartrending story. Skimming through the 39,000 reviews on Goodreads tells me that the core of the controversy was that author Jeanine Cummins is not Mexican. American Dirt
That’s like saying that Anthony Doerr had no business writing, or winning a Pulitzer, for All the Light We Cannot See. He was born in Cleveland twenty-eight years after it ended, so how could he tell the poignant and terrifying story of a French girl and a German boy caught in the clutches of WWII.
Like any first-class novelist, Cummins did her research. She cites dozens of Mexican and American sources in her acknowledgments. She also suggests that everyone should learn more about “the realities of compulsory migration” by reading authors such as Mexican-American novelist Luis Alberto Urrea, Mexican author Reyna Grande and Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez. Her research comes through on every page of the story.
Lydia is forced to flee overnight from her relatively peaceful middleclass life in Acapulco after her journalist husband writes an exposé about the leader of the regional drug cartel. He and the rest of her family are slaughtered. Only Lydia and her eight-year-old son Luca survive.
Heading for the safety of the U.S., they cannot risk identification by any of the Mexican cartel gang members. She and Luca must blend into the crowds of migrants headed north. They learn to hop onto moving freight trains, a series of northbound trains known as la bestia. They witness tragic deaths and experience soul-stirring kindnesses. But they can never be sure who might betray them, including the coyote they hire to take them across the border.
The horrible stories Lydia and Luca hear along the way – murder, rape, torture, police corruption – blend with their own. They are running so fast, in a state of moment-by-moment survival, that Lydia has not even had time to process the loss of her family and of her husband Sebastian, the love of her life:
Perhaps she’s not ready. Lydia knows the stages of grief, and this is denial. Instead of acceptance she wants to recall Sebastian’s face, lunch that day in the café, the boyish tilt of his posture at the small table after their first glass of wine. They’d laughed together, and Sebastian had made a show of looking discreetly down her top, of rubbing her thigh beneath the table, of asking if she wanted to head back to the shop early so he could help her ‘check inventory.’ But in the slick heat of the memory that follows, she cannot conjure Sebastian’s face. The absolute absence of him feels like unmitigated terror.
Bestselling author Don Winslow referred to American Dirt as ‘the Grapes of Wrath of our times.’ A gifted writer, Jeanine Cummins is not Steinbeck, not yet at least. But she does mirror the human suffering he describes, the abject fear of people forced to migrate, people running away from a place they can no longer survive.
