American Dirt

By Jeanine Cummins, Flatiron Books, 2020, 387 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, July 15, 2020

The Copper Clapper Caper Reviews group is fat with journalists and lovers of independent bookstores, so “American Dirt,” with a bookstore-owner protagonist who’s married to a journalist, should find an audience here for that alone. But there are a lot more reasons to love it.

Lydia Quixano Pérez sells books in Acapulco. Her husband, a newspaper reporter, publishes a story that angers the head of the drug cartel that controls the city, forcing Lydia and her 8-year-old son Luca to seek refuge in the United States. The narrative follows the pair’s dangerous journey, keeping readers as uncertain about whom to trust as Lydia is.

She is a compelling character, strong, vulnerable, scared and fiercely protective of her son. She proves to be stronger than some of the characters she encounters on the journey and draws courage from Luca, who knows enough to be scared but not enough to be deterred.

Much of the charm is in the secondary characters: teenage sisters Soledad and Rebeca who are fleeing Honduras, the frightening Lorenzo, puckish Beto and the coyote, El Chacal — the jackal. The beautiful, hardened, determined Soledad is particularly well drawn and proves to be a second source of strength for Lydia. Of the two, Soledad will stay with me longer.

The strength of the women in “American Dirt” is appealing because of its realism. The women possess the fortitude to persevere in extraordinary, terrifying circumstances, but Cummins shows us their fear, their indecision, and their entirely believable motives. The women and children are the stars of this story, and it’s refreshing to experience the journey through them.

I have never known what it is like to flee, much less what it’s like to flee with no transportation, no known allies, no certainty that I would be allowed across a border, and limited money. Never mind knowing what it’s like to evade people who would rape and kill me, steal or kill my child, or how it feels to face the possibility of being separated from my child in a foreign country. Cummins lets us feel what that’s like while helping us get to know the people willing to take those risks for the possibility of a life in the U.S.

As the author told The Irish News, "At worst, we perceive [migrants] as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, as a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamouring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.”

It’s rare for a publisher to cancel an author’s book tour when the book is setting sales records. But that’s exactly what happened to Cummins, a white woman born and raised in America, married to an Irishman who was undocumented in the U.S. for a decade. Although the book was initially welcomed as a compassionate look at immigration, it quickly drew detractors who argued that it was not Cummins’ story to tell.

In the review that launched the controversy, Myriam Gurba wrote, “That Lydia is so shocked by her own country’s day-to-day realities […] gives the impression that Lydia might not be … a credible Mexican. In fact, she perceives her own country through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist.”

The knocks against “American Dirt” aren’t that it’s a bad book (the nine-publisher bidding war that resulted in a seven-digit sale suggests otherwise), nor that Cummins’ intentions were bad. They’re that Cummins was the wrong person to write the book, that plenty of Mexican and Mexican-American writers have gone unpublished while an American who researched the topic, interviewed migrants, talked to aid organizations and volunteered in a Tijuana soup kitchen got a big payday and a movie deal by exploiting a topic she knows little about.

It’s the White Oscars argument applied to literature, and while there is validity in it, it shouldn’t diminish the significance of Cummins’ work. I don’t care if she got some of the Mexican geography wrong any more than I care that cars make a left turn in a movie about San Francisco and are suddenly in a different part of town. It’s fiction; the authenticity is in the characters not in their map.

I hope every author of every nationality who tells a great story greatly finds a generous, influential publisher so the rest of us may benefit from their work and skill. I am certainly glad the Cummins found a publisher; this tale increased my understanding of immigration and humanized those who see American dirt as the ground on which they must stand.

As the young boy Beto observes with the migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, “This is the whole problem, right? Look at that American flag over there—you see it? All bright and shiny; it looks brand-new. And then look at ours. It’s all busted up and raggedy. The red doesn’t even look red anymore. It’s pink.”