This cover image released by Flatiron Books shows "American Dirt," a novel by Jeanine Cummins. (Flatiron Books via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — The publisher of Jeanine Cummins’ controversial novel “American Dirt” has canceled the remainder of her promotional tour, citing concerns for her safety.
The novel about a Mexican mother and her young son fleeing to the U.S. border had been praised widely before its Jan. 21 release and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. But Mexican American writers have been among those strongly criticizing “American Dirt” for stereotypical depictions of Mexicans. Cummins is of Irish and Puerto Rican background and had herself raised questions about the narrative, writing in an author’s note at the end of the book that she had wondered if “someone slightly browner than me” should have done it.
“Jeanine Cummins spent five years of her life writing this book with the intent to shine a spotlight on tragedies facing immigrants,” Bob Miller, president and publisher of Flatiron Books, said in a statement Wednesday. “We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well-intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor.
“Unfortunately, our concerns about safety have led us to the difficult decision to cancel the book tour.”
Flatiron Books is instead hoping to organize a series of town hall discussions.
Cummins, 45, had made a handful of promotional appearances since her book was released, but over the past few days the St. Louis-based Left Bank Books had called off an event and Flatiron had canceled interviews in California. The tour for her heavily promoted book had been scheduled to last at least through mid-February, with planned stops everywhere from Seattle to Oxford, Mississippi.
Miller says that the town hall gatherings would include Cummins and her critics, calling it “an opportunity to come together and unearth difficult truths to help us move forward as a community.” On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Winfrey confirmed that Winfrey will meet as planned with the author next month and that the discussion will air in March on Apple TV Plus. “American Dirt” was the third novel picked by Winfrey since she began a partnership with Apple last year.
Earlier Wednesday, dozens of authors, including Valeria Luiselli, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tommy Orange, published an open letter to Winfrey that urged her to reconsider her selection of Cummins’ novel.
“The book club provides a seal of approval that can still, we hope, be changed,” they wrote. “Good intentions do not make good literature particularly not when the execution is so faulty, and the outcome so harmful.”
Winfrey first chose “American Dirt” last fall, before any criticism had emerged and acknowledged in a pre-publication interview with the AP that she was unaware of any controversy. She has since posted a video on Instagram, saying that she had been following the debate and hoped for a broad discussion.
“I’ve spent the past few days listening to members of the Latinx community to get a greater understanding of their concerns, and I hear them. I do,” Winfrey said in the video. “What I want to do is bring people together from all sides to talk about this book.”
“American Dirt” has dramatized ongoing issues of diversity in publishing that mirror criticisms of Hollywood. From publishers and editors to booksellers and agents, the book industry is predominantly white. Miller acknowledged that the novel “exposed deep inadequacies” at Flatiron and apologized for how the novel was promoted.
“We should never have claimed that it was a novel that defined the migrant experience; we should not have said that Jeanine’s husband was an undocumented immigrant while not specifying that he was from Ireland,” he wrote. He also referred to a picture that surfaced on social media from a promotional dinner last May, when table centerpieces included barbed wire decorations based on the book’s cover image.
“We can now see how insensitive those and other decisions were, and we regret them,” Miller said.
Flatiron is a division of Macmillan and has had authors ranging from former Vice President Joe Biden to Winfrey, who also has her own imprint at Flatiron that is releasing an Alicia Keys memoir in March.
One of Cummins’ leading detractors, Myriam Gurba, tweeted Wednesday that she, too, had security concerns. She wrote she had received death threats because of her criticisms and added “Let’s talk about the SAFETY of MIGRANTS and LATINX ppl. That’s what that book was intended to do, right?”
Cummins was defended by Ann Patchett, the author and bookstore owner who runs Parnassus Books in Nashville and gave the book an early blurb. In an email to The Associated Press, she wrote that Cummins had done a “beautiful job talking about the journey she’s been on with this book,” but that she understood the decision to end the tour.---30---“For the record, I loved ‘American Dirt.’ I’ve never in my life seen this kind of public flogging,” she wrote.
Despite the criticism, Cummins’ novel was easily the top-selling work of fiction last week, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks around 85 percent of the print market. “American Dirt” sold more than 48,000 copies during its first week, even topping Delia Owens’ blockbuster “Where the Crawdads Sing,” which sold just under 25,000 copies.
Why people are mad about 'American Dirt,' a new novel about a Mexican family's journey to the US
Ashley Collman
There has been widespread backlash to the new novel "American Dirt," by Jeanine Cummins.
The novel traces a Mexican mother and son's journey to the US.
Multiple Latinx writers have questioned how Cummins wrote the story and whether it was hers to tell.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
"American Dirt" by Jeanine Cummins. Flatiron BooksIn the last week, you may have noticed a new book becoming the topic of many heated conversations.
"American Dirt," the new novel by Jeanine Cummins, traces the journey a mother and son make to the US, after a cartel kills their family in a massacre at a quinceañera.
The outrage has focused on Cummins, who is of mixed Irish and Puerto Rican heritage, writing about the Mexican and migrant experiences. The fervor reached a critical point on Wednesday, when her publisher, Flatiron Books, decided to cancel the rest of the book tour.
Here's what sparked the backlash.
American Dirt was set to be one of the biggest book releases of the year
Cummins was paid a rare $1 million advance for the book, and Oprah Winfrey chose it as her first book club pick of 2020 — something that almost guarantees a bestseller.
High-profile fellow authors such as John Grisham and Stephen King gave it rave reviews.
"The very best novel I've read about immigrants (and the best novel I've read over the past year)," columnist Barbara Lane wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle.
She added: "'American Dirt' is being compared to 'The Grapes of Wrath,' and the comparison is apt."
But as the book was set to be released, criticism started coming out
Mexican-American author Myriam Gurba was one of the first to give the book a bad review, writing on the blog Tropics of Meta.
In her review, Gurba accuses Cummins of appropriating Latinx culture (Cummins has a Puerto Rican grandmother), filling her book with Mexican stereotypes, and heavily borrowing from other books about the immigrant experience.
"Cummins bombards with clichés from the get-go. Chapter One starts with assassins opening fire on a quinceañera, a fifteenth birthday party, a scene one can easily imagine President Donald Trump breathlessly conjuring at a Midwestern rally, and while Cummins' executioners are certainly animated, their humanity remains shallow," Gurba wrote.
Jeanine Cummins speaks at a Washington, DC bookstore on January 22.
She continued: "By categorizing these characters as 'the modern bogeymen of urban Mexico,' she flattens them. By invoking monsters with English names and European lineages, Cummins reveals the color of her intended audience: white."
David Bowles, a Mexican-American poet, wrote in a Medium post on January 18 that "American Dirt" is "harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama."
Soon others were piling onto the book on social media
Then a rash of opinion pieces came out trying to explain the scandal
Former undocumented Mexican immigrant Julissa Arce wrote on BuzzFeed: "As a Latina writer, my petitions were for us to be seen, heard, and understood. For our talent to be recognized and our stories to be honored — for our lived experiences to create a better reality for our community. Jeanine Cummins' novel American Dirt — or 'The Grapes of Wrath for our times,' according to author Don Winslow — is neither the dream I had hoped for nor the vehicle that is going to create the type of change our community deserves."
Tina Vasquez pointed out in the Boston Globe that the majority of migrants who try to cross the US-Mexico border are from Central America, and not Mexico, like the characters in Cummins' novel. "This may seem like a small point of contention, but it seems illustrative of the larger criticism surrounding the novel."
The Los Angeles Times' Esmeralda Bermudez wrote that the book made her "cringe" because she realized it "was not written for people like me," immigrants, but "for everyone else — to enchant them, take them on a wild border-crossing ride, make them feel all fuzzy inside about the immigrant plight. All, unfortunately, with the worst stereotypes, fixations, and inaccuracies about Latinos."
Cummins also faced accusations of plagiarism
On January 24, author David J. Schmidt wrote on the Huffington Post that some of the scenes in "American Dirt" reminded him of nonfiction books he had read.
He said when he first read a scene in "American Dirt" about a boy being crushed to death by a garbage truck, it immediately reminded him of a section in Luis Alberto Urrea's book "By the Lake of Sleeping Children," which is about the author's years of humanitarian work in Tijuana, Mexico.
"Other scenes in 'American Dirt' also bear significant similarity to Urrea's work, and to that of Sonia Nazario, whose 2006 narrative nonfiction book, 'Enrique's Journey,' tells the story of a boy who migrates from Honduras to the United States atop the freight train known as La Bestia," Schmidt wrote.
Some people were angered to learn that Cummins' former illegal immigrant husband was actually from Ireland
Omar El Akkad, one of the authors who wrote advance praise for the book, took to Twitter on Tuesday to say he felt gaslighted by the publisher.
"Through very careful language, the marketing copy for American Dirt implied that the author not only had a personal connection to the material, but that her husband himself had an even more direct connection, being an illegal immigrant himself."
He added: "A few weeks later, I learned the marketing copy was all bull----. There is no personal connection. The author's husband immigrated here from... Ireland."
—sarah j. dudski (@dudski) January 29, 2020
Cummins' barbed wire nail art and book party centerpieces, modeled off her cover, didn't help
—oliver merino (@olivermerino4) January 23, 2020
—Alex P 👹 (@SaddestRobots) January 31, 2020
Some of the people who spoke out said their issue was not with the book, but the lack of diversity it showed in the publishing industry
—viet thanh nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) January 30, 2020
—Bree Newsome Bass (@BreeNewsome) January 24, 2020
—Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) January 24, 2020
On Wednesday, dozens of authors signed a letter asking Oprah to cancel 'American Dirt' as her book club pick
"This is not a letter calling for silencing, nor censoring," the letter reads. "But in a time of widespread misinformation, fearmongering, and white-supremacist propaganda related to immigration and to our border, in a time when adults and children are dying in US immigration cages, we believe that a novel blundering so badly in its depiction of marginalized, oppressed people should not be lifted up."
Oprah responded with a video on Tuesday, saying she didn't plan to cancel the book but would be having a special discussion about it in March.
"It has become clear to me from the outpouring of very passionate opinions that this selection has struck an emotional chord and created a need for a deeper more substantive discussion," Oprah said.
Cummins' publisher eventually canceled her book tour
In an announcement on Wednesday, Bob Miller, the president and publisher of Flatiron Books, said they would be canceling the rest of the book tour because of safety concerns.
Miller said the negative reaction caught them by surprise and "exposed deep inadequacies in how we at Flatiron Books address issues of representation." He continued:
"On a more specific scale we made serious mistakes in the way we rolled out this book. We should never have claimed that it was a novel that defined the migrant experience; we should not have said that Jeanine's husband was an undocumented immigrant while not specifying that he was from Ireland; we should not have had a centerpiece at our bookseller dinner last May that replicated the book jacket so tastelessly. We can now see how insensitive those and other decisions were, and we regret them."
However, Miller said they were planning town hall events where Cummins will discuss the book with some of the "groups who have raised objections" to it.
A few people have defended Cummins
Oprah Winfret, left, appears on CBS This Morning with Jeanine Cummins, second left, to promote her new book club pick, "American Dirt," on January 21. CBS via Getty
Washington Post book critic Ron Charles found the focus on Cummins' ancestry startling. He wrote:
"Cummins has been attacked for exaggerating her ethnic background and for failing to note that her Irish husband — once an illegal immigrant — didn't belong to a sufficiently repressed minority group. (That complaint is so clouded by historical amnesia that I don't know where to start.)
"Listening to the anger directed at Cummins for having only one Latina grandparent, I suppose future novelists will have to submit their manuscripts along with a 23andMe genetic profile."
Author Ann Patchett also defended Cummins in an email to the Associated Press, saying that she did a "beautiful job talking about the journey she's been on with this book."
"For the record, I loved 'American Dirt,' I've never in my life seen this kind of public flogging," Patchett wrote.
What Cummins has said
At an event at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., on January 22, Cummins said she put a lot of work into the book:
"I did five years of research. I went to the border. I went to Mexico. I traveled throughout the borderlands. I visited Casa del Migrante in Mexico. I visited orphanages. I volunteered at a desayunador, which is like a soup kitchen for migrants. I met with the people who have devoted their lives on the front line to the work of protecting vulnerable people. ... And despite the fact that it has grown into this crazy moment that I never anticipated and that feels as if I'm in the eye of the hurricane, I know for a fact that this book is moving people."
The outage doesn't seem to have impacted sales
Flatiron increased the first printing to 500,000 books from 300,000, and the book appeared on more than a dozen lists of anticipated books for 2020, according to The New York Times.
For the week of January 26, it was the top-selling fiction book on Amazon. It's also at the top of the Times' best-seller list.
BOOKS UPDATED JAN. 30, 2020
Why Is Everyone Arguing About the Novel American Dirt?
By Rebecca Alter
American Dirt was released on January 21, 2020. Photo: Vulture
On January 21, Oprah Winfrey announced her latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, the new novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. Winfrey tweeted: “From the first sentence, I was IN … Like so many of us, I’ve read newspaper articles and watched television news stories and seen movies about the plight of families looking for a better life, but this story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way.” Winfrey also posted a video of her endorsement to the Oprah’s Book Club Twitter account, saying, “I was opened, I was shook up, it woke me up, and I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom. So I want you to read. Come read with us, and then join the conversation with Jeanine Cummins on Apple TV+ coming this March.”
Hello, fellow book lovers! My next @oprahsbookclub selection is “American Dirt” by @jeaninecummins. From the first sentence, I was IN. pic.twitter.com/uonqIa3QRK— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) January 21, 2020
Our next book club selection is “American Dirt” by @jeaninecummins. It’s a heart-wrenching page-turner, and you won’t be able to put it down.
Download your copy on @applebooks and #ReadWithUs: https://t.co/w62380H4Lz #AmericanDirt@Flatironbooks @Oprah pic.twitter.com/v6K23tEyPM— Oprah's Book Club (@oprahsbookclub) January 21, 2020
Book Twitter reacted to the announcement with swiftness, although perhaps not in the way Oprah’s team would have wanted, citing the recent #OwnVoices movement. American Dirt has been the subject of controversy and criticism since 2019, when early readers first offered their opinions after seeing advance copies. The book has been called “stereotypical,” and “appropriative” for “opportunistically, selfishly, and parasitically” telling the fictional story of a Mexican mother and son’s journey to the border after a cartel murders the rest of their family. One of the more common knocks is that the book engages in “brownface,” incorporating a nominally Mexican perspective that was written by a woman who — as recently as 2016 — identified as “white.” In the lead-up to American Dirt’s release, Cummins revealed she has a Puerto Rican grandmother. The conversation surrounding American Dirt’s “ripped from the headlines” approach to telling this migrant story in an American voice for American readers places it within ongoing debates in the lit world about who can tell what stories.
Some professional critics also had at American Dirt in the days before its January 21 release. New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal said that the “rapturous and demented praise” the book has received in the press might be owed in part to the fact that “tortured sentences aside, American Dirt is enviably easy to read” and “determinedly apolitical. The deep roots of these forced migrations are never interrogated; the American reader can read without fear of uncomfortable self-reproach.” Some of that praise also comes from the Times; in the Book Review, Lauren Groff was ultimately ambivalent but called the book “propulsive” and “swift,” and regarded its polemical “uncomplicated moral universe” as a feature rather than a bug. Groff (who, for the record, is white) praises Cummins’s efforts and excuses her appropriation, whereas Sehgal (who is not) questions Cummins’s stated motivation in writing this story:
Shouldn’t the story matter, her effort to individuate people portrayed as a “faceless brown mass” (her words)? In the book’s afterword, she agonizes about not being the right person to write the book (“I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”) but decides that she has a moral obligation to the story.
Groff caused an even further Twitter stir when the New York Times Books account tweeted a link to her review with this (since-deleted) pull quote: “‘American Dirt’ is one of the most wrenching books I have read in a few years, with the ferocity and political reach of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s novel.” Groff responded: “Please take this down and post my actual review.” Apparently this quote was from an “early version” of her review, to which she had made “radical changes.” Still, this gaffe was enough to ignite Twitter discourse about who should have the platform to review certain stories, in addition to who should write them.
https://t.co/dlJZWJHFxL pic.twitter.com/egaYkd7BGT— bradley babendir (@therealbradbabs) January 19, 2020
After Oprah announced Jeanine Cummins’s controversial American Dirt as her latest Book Club pick, immigration reporter Aura Bogado shared a tweet the author posted back in November, showcasing a “pretty” nail-art interpretation of her book jacket, which features a barbed-wire design. Bogado critiqued Cummins’s “vulgar pleasure of proudly wearing this exact symbol of oppression as a fashion statement,” sparking a new wave of outrage over what’s seen as a blatant visual representation of how Cummins is insensitively capitalizing on immigrant trauma.
Jeanine Cummins got a barbwire manicure. The fetish here, the vulgar pleasure of proudly wearing this exact symbol of oppression as a fashion statement and claiming it's "pretty," is literally making me nauseous. I wanna throw up. https://t.co/AdOlPwz6mw— Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) January 23, 2020
What is wrong with all of you? Barbed wire manis? Are you intentionally trolling for bad press or just legit this dumb and or like actually cruel?— Chelsea Peretti (@chelseaperetti) January 23, 2020
Then on January 26, Oprah posted a two-minute video to the Oprah’s Book Club Instagram, announcing that as a response to the “outpouring … of very passionate opinions,” she spoke with members of the Latinx community about their concerns with American Dirt and will air an Apple TV+ event in March to “bring people together from all sides to talk about this book, and who gets to publish what stories. I’m hoping that that is going to resonate with many of you and your concerns.”
After this announcement, writers Roberto Lovato, David Bowles, and Myriam Gurba began tweeting under the hashtag #DignidadLiteraria as a “call to politico-literary action,” and many authors and activists are using the hashtag along with #ownvoices in their calls for better representation. Vox reported that Immigrant Youth Group United We Dream is petitioning Oprah to include more Latinx and immigrant authors in the Book Club. On January 27, the Oprah’s Book Club Instagram account moved forward as usual, posting the reading schedule for American Dirt. The account posted the schedule with the caption: “Over the next several weeks we will be using this platform to share a diverse array of content, including books by Mexican and Latinx authors. More to come.”
On January 29, American Dirt’s publisher Flatiron Books released a statement from its president, Bob Miller, about how they were “surprised by the anger that has emerged from members of the Latinx and publishing communities” in response to the book’s release and Flatiron’s role in tone-deaf publicity. Miller acknowledges “serious mistakes,” such as barbed-wire centerpieces at a bookseller dinner, and that they “should not have said that Jeanine’s husband was an undocumented immigrant while not specifying that he was from Ireland.” In the statement, Miller announced that Flatiron will cancel the book tour, citing “concerns about safety” and “specific threats to booksellers and the author.”
Statement from Bob Miller (President & Publisher, Flatiron Books) regarding AMERICAN DIRT: pic.twitter.com/S4sQetyS2s— Flatiron Books (@Flatironbooks) January 29, 2020
Many replies to this statement find it to be inadequate, using language of “white privilege,” “victimhood,” and “dog whistling” to frame Latinx concerns about the book as violent and scary, rather than simply writing an apology with a promise to improve their practices. Many commenters took issue with passages from the statement, like “it’s unfortunate that she is the recipient of hatred from within the very communities she sought to honor. We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well-intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor.”
Flatiron Books: “We apologize...”
“Well that’s a start.”
Flatiron Books: “...for how savage & horrible black and brown people in the Latinx community are acting towards us.” pic.twitter.com/3gLSO6tUGU— X (@XLNB) January 30, 2020
Just say you messed up. Organziers, activists, writers like us who are also committed to social justice and change do not threaten harm the fact that you are using this stereotype to cancel the tour reinforces your unwillingness to be accountable.— Rosa A. Clemente (@rosaclemente) January 29, 2020
At the end of the statement, Miller announced that in place of the book tour, Flatiron Books will organize a town-hall series “where Jeanine will be joined by some of the groups who have raised objections to the book.” There are no further details yet about this series of meetings.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, American Dirt has already been optioned for a movie adaptation by Charles Leavitt, the writer of Blood Diamond, and Imperative Entertainment, the production company behind Clint Eastwood’s The Mule. While you wait for that come out, you can add your name to a 150-plus person hold list for American Dirt at your local library and catch Oprah’s Apple TV+ feature on it in March.
This post has been updated throughout.
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Opinion
‘American Dirt’ Has Us Talking. That’s a Good Thing.
The publishing industry changed its opinion of Mexican immigrant stories only after someone outside our community wrote one.By Reyna Grande
Ms. Grande is a Mexican-American author.
Jan. 30, 2020
A portion of the United States-Mexico border fence in El Paso.
Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Last fall, I was sent an advance copy of Jeanine Cummins’s new novel, “American Dirt,” and a request for an endorsement. As a Mexican-American woman and an immigrant, it was clear to me that I was not the intended audience for this story. And yet, I found it compelling. I noticed its shortcomings, the things she got wrong about our culture and experience, but saw past them. I felt that a book like this could complement the Latino immigrant literature that has and will continue to be written by Latino writers, myself included.
I was born in Mexico, in the troubled state of Guerrero, where the main characters of “American Dirt” are from. It was in my hometown, Iguala, where 43 college students were abducted and disappeared in 2014, so the violence rang true to me. I am a native Spanish speaker, but my own books are riddled with Spanish mistakes because I was in fifth grade when I came to the United States.
I hoped that “American Dirt” would generate more discussion about the border and the anti-immigrant mentality that has dominated our society for too long. And it is doing just that, but in an unexpected way. It is raising awareness about another kind of border — the walls that the publishing industry puts up for Latino writers.
I’m no stranger to borders. When I was 9, I left my home in Guerrero and risked my life to cross the United States-Mexico border on foot with my father and siblings. With the help of the coyote, the guide my father hired, we got past la migra, the border agents patrolling the unforgiving no man’s land just north of the border with Tijuana. After we crossed, the coyote drove us up Interstate 5 to our new home in Los Angeles. I remember sighing with relief, thinking the worst was behind me.
I was wrong. I learned that American society is very good at hindering its immigrant population by putting up barriers — real and metaphorical. I soon discovered there were more borders to cross — cultural, linguistic, legal, educational, economic and more. When I chose to pursue a career in writing, a field that is predominantly white, I realized that the publishing industry too had borders and people who patrol them. A 2019 survey of diversity in publishing found that 78 percent of executives, 85 percent of editors, 80 percent of critics and 80 percent of agents are white.
Once upon a time, being a border crosser was a source of shame for me. But when I got older, I realized that it was my superpower. When I began my journey toward my dream of writing professionally, I told myself, “If I could successfully cross the U.S.-Mexico border, I can cross any border!”
It took me three tries to cross that geographical border. It took me 27 attempts to get past the gatekeepers of the publishing industry who time and time again make Latino writers feel that our stories don’t matter. We are often told that there are no readers for our immigrant tales, that “these kinds” of stories about our pain and suffering don’t sell well, that immigrant stories have been told enough times and why can’t we write something new and different, something more marketable?
After 26 rejections, I finally got across the publishing border because an African-American editor felt that my novel about a Mexican immigrant girl was worthy of being read, that my voice deserved to be heard. She gave me a $20,000 book deal and her blessing.
I considered myself lucky. There are so many more Latino writers who never get across — whose writing dreams perish in the unwelcoming literary landscape.
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For the last 13 years, I’ve traveled the country talking about my immigrant experience. On stages across the United States, I bare my soul and relive the trauma of moments I’d rather forget, to help people understand that immigration is not a crime but an act of survival, that immigrants are not criminals but human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion.
The cover of “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins.Credit...Flatiron Books, via Associated Press
Sometimes, my words help open minds and hearts. Other times, they don’t. Recently, “The Moth Radio Hour” aired my story about a chance encounter on an airplane with a Guatemalan asylum seeker. An email later appeared in my inbox, and when I read it, I thought of “American Dirt” and its intended white audience:
You are an excellent speaker and clearly very sincere. However, I and many others completely disagree with your point of view. Illegals in the country, that is adults that came into the USA without proper permission should all be deported as soon as practicable and there never should be any amnesty in the future for anybody [shouldn’t have happened in the past eather] the young man you talked about should have been removed and sent back to where he came from, I do not want him here in my country. and no Dreamers that came here illegally should never be allowed to be citizens. And if it was up to me their children would not be alow to become citizens ether.
Maybe I am being naïve in thinking that this man and others like him might be more willing to show compassion toward immigrants if they heard it from someone other than a first- or second-generation immigrant. But after having spent my entire writing career advocating immigrant rights, I appreciate when another writer joins the fight. We need all the voices we can get, within and outside our community — perhaps especially from outside our community. I had hoped Ms. Cummins’s words would germinate in the toxic American dirt where my own words, and those of other Latino writers, have often failed to take root.
When I read “American Dirt,” I didn’t know the back story — the bidding war, the seven-figure advance, the proclamation that this was the immigration book of its time. When I found out, I confess it offended me and hurt me. I felt undervalued and deceived. The publishing industry had changed its opinion of Mexican immigrant stories — but not until it was someone from outside our community who had written one. I had seen Ms. Cummins as a writer who could speak with us, not for us. Instead, the publishing machine decided to put her book on a pedestal.
It is unfortunate that the publisher canceled the author’s future book events. That denies audiences across the country the opportunity to participate in face-to-face discussions with Ms. Cummins about the issues that are being raised around cultural appropriation and who gets to tell our stories. The reasons the publisher cited for the cancellation — “safety concerns” — and its dismissal of the legitimate concerns raised as “vitriolic rancor,” further denigrates the Latino community. Now is not the time to shut down conversations, but to encourage speaking out and listening to one another.
To me the issue is neither with the book nor its author, but rather with those institutions that silence some voices while elevating others. One positive outcome is that publishers have shown they are willing to pay top dollar and use the full strength of their marketing machine to promote the immigrant experience. They can’t back away from that now. Immigrant-written stories deserve the same treatment.
