American Dirt by Jeannine Cummings

Try to imagine the feeling of dread you have when watching a horror movie.  You watch with your hands over your eyes because you know the monster is coming; you just do not know when and from which dark corner.  Jeannine Cummings managed to capture that panicky feeling on each and every page of her novel, American Dirt.  The book opens in Acapulco at a family barbecue where a sudden, brutal massacre kills 16 family members leaving one mother and son alive, hidden in the bathroom, listening to the murderers laughing and eating the chicken rather than letting it go to waste.  We learn that the murders were in retaliation for a scathing article written for the local paper by Sebastian, an investigative journalist, in which he “outs” the cartel leader and his cruel gang and the take over of Acapulco by his drug cartel. The article truthfully describes the murders of locals, the flight of people from the city and the fear felt by the citizens as a result. The twist comes when we also find that the Jesé of the cartel, Javier, has become a friend of Sebastian’s wife, Lydia, and that she convinced her husband to publish the article reassuring him that “her friend” would not harm the writer and his family because of the relationship that he and Lydia have developed in their weekly get together at her bookshop.  Lydia realizes her grave mistake too late.  Her husband, her mother and all her family except Luca, her son, are dead because Javier is a killer despite his attempts to appear cultured and well read.  Thus begins the long, perilous journey of Lydia and Luca to el Norte.  We live the pain and the desperation of the mother and son as they join other migrants trying to make it to the only place they will be able to find a new life, the United States.  Cummings’ descriptions of the unimaginable risks these people take to get on the Beast (the boxcars of the many trains moving products north) and the unspeakable hardships and tortures such a rape that the migrants face every day are heartbreaking and eventually exhausting.  By the end of the journey the characters are whittled down to existence mode.  They have given up all pretense of sophistication; they just want to survive and as a reader you feel that way too.  Just get there; just finish the journey; just make it through the day.  American Dirt has faced backlash from the Latino community who complain the author is “stealing” their story and that Cummings descriptions of places and events is not factual.  The book is eye opening and given that much of literature is written about people and places the author has never seen, it seems that awareness is a positive result.  We rarely hear the story of migrants from a migrant point of view and even if this one is what some have described as “trauma porn”, the conversations that will arise are important.  I recommend you read this book, but do not expect to be comfortable as you do.