I am an immigrant. My family fled El Salvador with death pounding on our door. The terror, the loss, the injustice of this experience shaped everything about me. I see no part of myself reflected in American Dirt, a book white critics are hailing as the great immigrant novel.

Let me be clear: because American Dirt contains multiple inaccuracies and distortions, the White US readership in particular will come away with a stylized understanding of the issues from a melodramatic bit of literary pulp that frankly appears to have been drafted with their tastes in mind (rather than the authentic voices of Mexicanas and Chicanas).

Ah, and there’s the rub. White folks and other non-Mexican Americans in the US: you CANNOT judge for yourselves whether American Dirt is authentic. You’re going to have to trust Mexicans and Chicanx folks. I know that runs counter to the upbringing of so many. I know it defies our national discourse.

Pero ni modo. That’s too bad.

Cummins has put in the research, as she describes in her afterword, and the scenes on La Bestia are vividly conjured. Still, the book feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider. The writer has a strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradients of brown skin: Characters are “berry-brown” or “tan as childhood” (no, I don’t know what that means either). In one scene, the sisters embrace and console each other: “Rebeca breathes deeply into Soledad’s neck, and her tears wet the soft brown curve of her sister’s skin.” In all my years of hugging my own sister, I don’t think I’ve ever thought, “Here I am, hugging your brown neck.” Am I missing out?

The real failures of the book, however, have little to do with the writer’s identity and everything to do with her abilities as a novelist.

What thin creations these characters are — and how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations. The heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous. The children sound like tiny prophets. Occasionally there’s a flare of deeper, more subtle characterization, the way Luca, for example, experiences “an uncomfortable feeling of both thrill and dread” when he finally lays eyes on the other side of the border, or how, in the middle of the terror of escape, Lydia will still notice that her son needs a haircut.

But does the book’s shallowness paradoxically explain the excitement surrounding it? The tortured sentences aside, “American Dirt” is enviably easy to read. It is determinedly apolitical. The deep roots of these forced migrations are never interrogated; the American reader can read without fear of uncomfortable self-reproach. It asks only for us to accept that “these people are people,” while giving us the saintly to root for and the barbarous to deplore — and then congratulating us for caring.

A self-professed gabacha, Jeanine Cummins, wrote a book that sucks. Big time.

Her obra de caca belongs to the great American tradition of doing the following:

1. Appropriating genius works by people of color

2. Slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and

3. Repackaging them for mass racially “colorblind” consumption.

Rather than look us in the eye, many gabachos prefer to look down their noses at us. Rather than face that we are their moral and intellectual equals, they happily pity us. Pity is what inspires their sweet tooth for Mexican pain, a craving many of them hide. This denial motivates their spending habits, resulting in a preference for trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf. To satisfy this demand, Cummins tossed together American Dirt, a “road thriller” that wears an I’m-giving-a-voice-to-the-voiceless-masses merkin.

Most often we hear talk about the American Dream but what American Dirt did was portray the reasons for leaving one's home country and the journey to the United States. What is truly fear though, is there fear of the unknown or fear of the past to repeat? Fear is present and develops throughout the book. Keeping that in mind we´ĺl continue to talk about American Dirt. Some information on the author Jeannine Cummins before we get into the book, age 46, was born December 6, 1974 in Spain. She wrote this book through research and visiting several migrant shelters and orphanages in Mexico as well as migrant helpers who like to provide water, food in the desert. They influenced her writing very deeply by seeing what these people go through just to get to the United States such as hopping on a train knowingly they could fall and get crushed or split in half to death. The book started with Luca and Lydia, a mother and son with their family at a quinceanera but quickly turned into them fearing for their life, as they were hidden in a bathroom waiting for the bullets to stop. Fear was the only word that was present in that moment. ¨Luca does not breathe. Mami does not breathe. Their eyes are closed, their bodies motionless, even their adrenaline is suspended within the calcified will of their stillness¨(Cummins 3). Lydia always had a hidden fear, she feared for herself and her family when her husband became a journalist and it came true. As they came out they saw their family stripped away from them as they were murdered brutally by the cartel. American Dirt started with action but then quickly retraced what caused the murder as well as explained the current situation with Luca and Lydia fleeing the cartel in order to be able to survive they had to cross into the United States or to the American Dirt. Luca´s father, Sebastian, was a journalist and he would often write about the cartel, especially Javier (the cartel leader). This is where another fear for Lydia developed as she knew her husband could die for writing about the cartel. At the same time though Javier began to develop a friendship with Lydia without Sebastian knowing and as Javier grew closer to Lydia the relationship became more of a romantic relationship only through Javier´s eyes though as he wanted to be with her. Throughout Sebastian´s career though the biggest fear was death, as where they lived it was a big-time period where the cartel killed people, anyone really. Continuing on in the book Lydia is told a reporter was shot by men on a motorcycle and right away she began to fear for Sebastian´s life. ¨She panicked and cried out¨ (Cummins 123). Giving us another example of a moment in her life where she feared not only for her life but her husbands´. The book then talked us through her journey from a third-person point of view. She left Acapulco and her struggles to get away from there. The fear becomes such a vivid image at this point in the book as she turns and all around her people are getting raped, jumped, or even killed off the train. At the same time of the journey the book often talks about her life before the massacre and things along the journey that remind her of her past life giving her motivation for the new country as well. Towards the end of the book we see the ends all tying together and some untying but throughout it all the fear still remains, not of the cartel but of the legal status, the possibility of being deported at any time can be scary and it creates an unavoidable fear. Although the fear of dying from the cartel disappears, the book shows us that fear can be a motivator for immigrants to pursue a new life on American soil or dirt. For a new life and a new dream.
There may be people who may not like this book for the simple fact it is very gruesome. It gives details about the cartel, as to how they killed people, what they did to women, and many other details that may trigger some audience members. There may also be people who may not like it because it may be hard to read about the journey of crossing to Mexico, and the details it gives on what happens to those who are not successful on the train and crossing. Now for those that are interested in reading this book, it provides another eye-opener of what immigrants go through when they cross to the United States. It is really a new perspective as to what situations may cause them to leave their home country and come to a new one for a better life.