BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: American Dirt (Jeanine Cummins, author)
Fiction, immigration, U.S.- Mexico border, Mexican cartel violence, flight, The Beast, asylum seekers, mother and son, Acapulco.
American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins, is a powerful and topically timely story, a Herculean journey. With the ever more complicated immigration crisis percolating at the U.S.-Mexico border, the plight and fate of thousands of would-be immigrants, including those fleeing horrific violence looms larger every day. Before reading this book, the crisis was a recurring, impenetrable news story to me, horrific and complex and thorny and at times seemingly unsolvable. American Dirt, like Solito (BookLife Review, August 24, 2023) paints the experience of immigration with memorable faces and stories; it converts the news into the terrifying plight of a mother and son, albeit a fictional pair. It humanizes the news, imbuing it with fear, hunger, drama and palpable despair. After reading it, I cannot listen to a border news story or hear about proposals to address the crisis the same way again.
The story opens with a brutal, shocking and violent vignette. Lydia Perez is a bookstore owner and her husband Sebastian is a reporter. They have a young son, Luca. Sebastian writes a story about a drug cartel, mistakenly assuming he and his family can stay safe after its publication. A cartel slaughters him and almost all of his extended family who have gathered for a family party in their modest Acapulco, Mexico neighborhood. Lydia and her son, Luca, survive the mass murder and must immediately flee for their lives. They begin a harrowing journey, much of it aboard “The Beast,” the train across Mexico to the U.S. border.
They are running for their lives, unable to trust anyone for fear of the extensive network the cartel wields in every corner of Mexican society, including the path to the U.S.
Lydia and Luca’s journey is brutal. They experience hunger, fear, thirst, hardship, homelessness, inhumane conditions and weather. There are dangers and threats at every turn. The dangers and details of their journey, and the knowledge that what the author describes is all too real and common, makes it all the more riveting a read. Lydia and Luca were living an ordinary life, they had a loving family and stable careers, until they did not. The abrupt upheaval in their lives is depicted as an experience with terror and violence that is not unique to them, but is the story of asylum seeking immigrants from across not only Mexico but Central and South America as well. It is not all horror and violence. Lydia and Luca experience kindness, care and generosity along the way, validating their love of their country and fellow country men and women. The ebb and flow and interplay of kindness and violence is wrenching.
Cummins humanizes the news and the backstory of victims of cartel violence seeking asylum, literally running for their lives, in a way the unending streams of images of people wading across the Rio Grande to surrender at barbed wire border fences cannot. Sometimes a single story contains a power that transcends fiction. Perhaps every U.S. Senator and member of Congress should read American Dirt and Solito, then revisit the vote on border policy and humanitarian aid.
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