American Dirt: years of work
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins follows the story of Lydia, a bookstore owner, and her son Luca, who flee from Acapulco, Mexico, after a drug cartel brutally murders their entire family.
The murder scene starts off the book, and its traumatic details are written in crystal clear detail. The clack-clacking of bullets that pierce rafts of uncontrolled, short-lived screams, because those noises get exterminated. You hear the creaks of the door and see the shadows, as little Luca is shoved into the bathtub by Mami to hide, and he accidentally bit his lip, smears the drop of blood against the white tiles to avoid any trace of himself, and self-soothes while trying to distinguish the two or three men’s voices with AK-47s. The bathroom door is left ajar, because a closed door would invite more scrutiny.
These small details compose the book and build up a sense of concreteness in every single action each character takes, from the coyote smuggling them across the border battling too much attachment to any migrant, for the death of one cannot burden their journey of the whole, up north; to the ruthless cartel head, Javier Crespo, crafting fear meticulously to coerce what’s remaining of Lydia’s family to flee from the palm of his hand.
The mother and son embark on a dangerous journey as undocumented immigrants, hoping to reach the United States, or El Norte, for safety. They meet other migrants with their own harrowing stories.
Controversy surrounds this book and critics question why Cummins feels a need to tell this story. She tells the story to such detail, encapsulating the hidden narratives that would not be obvious from regular folks hearing it on the news, about how one migrant died every 90 minutes worldwide in 2017. Mexico was the deadliest country in the world at that time to be a journalists, and the nationwide murder rate was absurd. Yet, Cummins herself has had no first-hand experience making such a trek up north, and instead conducted extensive research and interviewed migrants, activists, and other people over the course of four years. However, some people critique her lack of authenticity and her book being trauma porn. Trauma porn is media or literature that sensationalizes or exploits the suffering of individuals or communities, often for the purpose of entertainment or to evoke a strong emotional response, which can be seen as exploitative or voyeuristic, focusing more on the graphic details of trauma than on the human experience or context surrounding it. My take is oversimplified — but for the vast majority of the book, I think Cummins more so attempts to portray the human experience and the context surrounding the stories of undocumented migrants, not the graphic details only, and does not simply drop emotionally charged vignettes for the purposes of eliciting pain. From my limited positionality, I’d like to say that American Dirt is beautifully moving, and the details are remarkably realistic, encapsulating a few careful angles and narratives. Cummins’ years of work (interviews, research, learning from people) are evident across the pages.
