While visiting home last month, my mother encouraged me to read this book -- and I am so glad that she did! As I sit and write about it now, more than a month later, the vivid plot still rises fresh in my mind. It reminds me of a "take your child to work day," when I went with my father to his small research farm in South Florida. After lunch, we visited one of the nearby organic tomato farms. There, I saw a line of migrants who looked barely older than myself, all waiting in the brutal Florida heat to pick tomatoes and earn a scant living, much of which was sent back to families throughout Central America. As I looked at them, they looked back at me; and, while my family and I were by no means rich, the look of envy in the eyes of many of those people stood stark as a reminder to me of my own privileged upbringing, even just the boon of being born in the US.
Of course, not every US citizen has seen or interacted with migrant people, or will have the opportunity. We get to ignore who picks the tomatoes when we pluck them, perfectly clean, from the grocery store shelf. To begin to remedy one's own lack of such experiences, I highly recommend reading American Dirt.
In this novel, Jeanine Cummins explores the migrant experience through the lens of Lydia and Luca Perez, a mother and son running from a murderous drug lord in Acapulco, Mexico. We follow them through their initially privileged and charmed life as it suddenly deteriorates after Lydia's husband, an honest reporter, publishes an exposé of the drug lord. Chapter after chapter then rocks between abject terror and serendipitous elation as Lydia and Luca work together to reach the US.
With a book like this, providing any details about the events will rapidly spoil the joy of reading it for oneself. So, instead, let me focus on the literary tool I found most satisfying: Cummins' clever choice of a woman and her son as the protagonists. While not a migrant herself, Cummins herself extensively researched the culture and challenges of migration as part of her writing process -- indeed, she leveraged her privilege as a US citizen to hear people's stories on both sides of the border. Through this, she learned of the horrors enacted on migrants by other migrants, cartel members, and police officers; and, she learned how these horrors disproportionately affect women and children. Thus, the story of Lydia and Luca, due to the protagonists' identities, is able to weave through a series of vignettes that holistically represent the migrant experience for people of a wide variety of identities.
Reading a book like this is often challenging, painful, and depressing. It is horrible to know that, while this is fiction, it is grounded in a reality that many privileged people like myself get to ignore every day. Luckily, Cummins doesn't just tell an exciting tale. She also ties in a variety of characters and organizations that work every day to aid migrants. These amazing and
very real people are integral to the plot, and enable Lydia and Luca's moments of triumph over the odds. Reading
American Dirt, one will feel overwhelming despair, but also gleaming hope -- and it is that hope, in the end, which is most beautiful and important to carry on.
It is my own hope that I can encourage others to read this book and become more empathetic to the migrant experience. Since reading it, I have wondered -- with few answers yet -- how we can work on society and culture to prevent anyone from needing to suffer the migration ordeal. In the immediate future, we can fund and support the organizations that help migrants. But in the long term, how do we reshape our world to give everyone a better chance? Maybe, if you read this book, you'll see an answer.
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