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Book Review: What ‘American Dirt’ Chooses to Bury

by Moses Sappe (Student at the University of ��«Ӱҵ in the module POL244, Spring 2024)

Written by Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt is a best-selling novel that provides a high-octane account of a Mexican mother’s journey to the United States after 15 members of her family are massacred by a drug cartel. Looking past its fast-paced, adrenaline-packed narrative, many argue that the book does not provide an accurate account of Latinx migration to the U.S. that could help better inform the ignorant or apathetic American citizen, Cummins’ target audience. Analysing how the migrant experience is gendered within the book, second-year Politics/IR undergraduate Moses Sappé contributes to this debate.

Introduction

The addition of American Dirt (AD) to Oprah Winfrey’s book club in 2020 brought with it a vociferous outpour of debate regarding migration, race and the publishing industry, generating a seismic level of publicity for the novel in the process (Bowles, 2020). Through summarising and then critically analysing how migration is represented within this book, focusing particularly on gender in the politically unbiased migrant experience that Cummins claims to provide (NPR, 2020, 49:00), I will argue that, as well as certain inaccuracies regarding South/North migrant flows, a result of Cummins’ aim to write a book that appeals to an American audience is that there is a lack of scrutiny concerning the U.S. government and its contribution to creating/escalating the scale of these migrant/refugee flows as well as the violence which accompanies it. As the story therefore decontextualizes the current flow of Southern/Central American migrants/refugees to the U.S.. At best, this consequently results in the novel being unfavourable to the author’s aim of increasing a depth of understanding of migration to the U.S.’ southern border through humanising ‘“the faceless brown mass” that she believes is so many people’s perception of immigrants’ (Hampton, 2020, para. 5.).

Summary

The book chronicles the journey of a mother, Lydia, and her son, Luca, from Acapulco to the United States (U.S.) after 15 of their family members are murdered by a cartel in response to Lydia’s husband publishing an exposé on its leader (Cummins, 2020, pp. 1-2). Forced to use clandestine means of travel to escape detection from the cartel that now actively hunts the pair, Luca and Lydia ride ‘La Bestia’, a notoriously dangerous train used by migrants that runs from southern Mexico to the southern U.S. border (Sorrentino, 2012). In doing so, they encounter Rebeca and Soledad, two teenagers from Honduras also attempting to migrate to the U.S. for safety after being displaced by criminal violence, who join their company (Cummins, 2020, pp. 158-169). The group then travels to the border-city of Nogales where they hire a ‘coyote’ (a person who smuggles migrants across the border for a fee) who helps them traverse the Sonoran desert with other migrants (Cummins, 2020, pp. 325-449). The group of 4 successfully arrive in the U.S. and begin to adapt to a life no longer defined by transience but nevertheless permeated by trauma (Cummins, 2020, pp. 450-454). Having had no direct experience/knowledge of forced migration, the research process took Cummins 5 years (Law, 2020, para. 9.) and involved her consulting various academics, lawyers, hostel owners and organisations such as the U.S. border patrol (Cummins, 2020, pp. 455-456). The book's main themes centre around ideas such as resilience, trauma, and the horrors that forced migration makes many endure, the latter being what Cummins’ wanted to expose an American audience to (NPR, 2020, 49:13). As the protagonist and the majority of the side characters are female, gender and the impact it has on the nature/extent of these horrors is a core focus of the book. Now, I will use AD’s depiction of the gendered migrant/refugee experience to highlight the wider strengths and limitations of Cummins’ novel.

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At its worst, the book allows the propagation of the notion that Mexicans, Southern Americans and Central Americans are a violent ‘other’ who are victims only to the actions of themselves, reinforcing the exact ignorance Cummins wished to counteract (NPR, 2020, 48:50). 

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The Myth of Single-Male Migration 

Cummins’ representation of migrant/refugee flows from South America (SA), Central America (CA) and Mexico is inaccurate and thus misinforms her readers of the current reality at the southern U.S. border. The spaces which migrants/refugees occupy are depicted as male-dominated, with these men being described as mostly young (Cummins, 2020, p. 125, 267, 282) and migrating to the U.S. for economic reasons (Cummins, 2020, p. 301), representing the gendered-selectivity of labour market migration (Massey, 2020, p. 17). This depiction, however, is an outdated representation of migrant/refugee flows from Mexico/SA/CA to the U.S.; as a result of cartel violence, a surge in female refugees migrating from SA and CA to the U.S. was documented years before the book was published (UNHCR, 2015), with the number of single migrants (almost all of which being men) dropping from 87% in 2013 to only 36% in the first quarter of 2019 (Massey, 2020, p. 18). The irony of Cummins’ writing is that her misunderstanding of migrant/refugee flows was exactly what led the U.S. government to helping create the border-crisis which she wishes to draw attention to; U.S. immigration policy makers had the same erroneous understanding of migrants from Mexico/SA/CA and thus created an immigrant detention system ‘built to handle single male workers held for short periods prior to a speedy removal process’ rather than families displaced by violence seeking safety (Massey, 2020, p. 20). AD does not completely entrench stereotypes about gender in migrant flows from Mexico/SA/CA to the U.S., however. The characters of Lydia, Rebeca and Soledad provide moving perspectives of displacement and contradict beliefs which frame “women as passive, immobile, or with a reduced or transitory mobility” (Stefoni et al., 2021, p. 529); Rebeca and Soledad’s skill in catching ‘La Bestia’ exemplify this (Cummins, 2020, p. 167) and the inclusion of the character of Marisol, a mother deported from the U.S. after her husband’s death (Cummins, 2020, pp. 350-354), shows that women of all ages are part of migrant/refugee flows too. Nevertheless, their presence as women/girls is still very often presented as exceptional, providing her audience with an inaccurate account of Mexican/SA/CA migrant/refugee flows despite her writing this book for the uninformed American (NPR, 2020, 49:25). 

Sexual Violence and U.S. Exceptionalism

Sexual violence is portrayed as seemingly inescapable throughout the migrants’ journey (Cummins, 2020 p. 194, 197, 247, 274, 426); though I believe Cummins’ account correctly illustrates the pervasiveness of ‘gender-based violence, as well as [the] denial of their rights and protection’ which migrants/refugees experience (Riggirozi et al., 2023, p. 3756), her idealisation of the U.S. as a place of refuge implicitly detracts from the role that U.S. organisations have in directly committing gendered violence when preventing migrant/refugee flows. Though the threat of sexual violence is mostly posed by the cartel/migrants/refugees in the book, Cummins rightfully writes about the threat of ‘la migra’ (U.S. Immigrations and Customs enforcement officers) too, including a scene where they grope Lydia (2020, p. 268) and rape Rebeca and Soledad (2020, p. 274). This level of abuse is consistent with accounts from reports that investigated the organisation’s conduct (Domínguez et al., 2022; Isacson and Martens, 2023) and Cummins’ characters critique the disjuncture between la migra’s function and the lethality of their equipment and tactics (2020, p. 259). Though admittedly rare and fleeting, moments where the role of state-actors/policies are discussed and critiqued like this or when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s capriciousness with deportation is addressed (Cummins, 2020, pp. 366-368) makes me hesitant to fully agree with Myriam Gurba’s famous statement that the novel was ‘trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf’ (2019, para. 12.). However, I agree with her that Cummins ‘misrepresents the United States as a safe harbor for women fleeing violence’ (2020, para. 6.), likely due to Cummins not wanting to be too offensive towards her American audience. The U.S. is by no means a safe place for women (Wulfhorst, 2018) and the constant framing of a false dichotomy between the ‘safe/civilised’ north and the dangerous/barbaric’ south ‘others’ those from Mexico/CA/SA. ‘Othering’ is the action where someone is differed from the majority culture, thereby reproducing positions of domination and subordination (Johnson et al., 2004, p. 253) and as AD fails to contextualise the South/North American migrant/refugee flow,  it allows the uninformed or apathetic to infer that these people from the Global South have a greater proclivity for violence and inability to deal with, what is framed in the book as, their own problems, reinforcing the anti-immigrant rhetoric regularly espoused across Congress. To summarise, by privileging the U.S. as the migrants’/refugees’ saviour, a bastion of safety on the periphery of various violent and lawless countries, the potency of Cummins’ critique of la migra is weakened in the process. 

Sexual Violence and U.S. Imperialism

The defining issue of AD is that despite Cummins justly illustrating how brutal U.S. agencies like la migra are in deterring migrant/refugee flows, she never refers to the role that the U.S.’ imperial legacy had in creating the conditions that led to such unprecedented levels of migrant/refugee flows/sexual violence. AD makes no reference to the U.S.’ backing of juntas in Guatemala (Gaffey, 2020, pp. 33-38), El Salvador (Binford, 2016, pp. 58-79) or Honduras (Weisbrot, 2011, p. 64), nor the ways in which its policies deliberately exacerbate cartel violence in Mexico for its own economic/political gain (Carlos, 2014); the blame for the violence thus defaults to the cartels/governments in Mexico/CA/SA. As trauma ‘represents a suffering without borders, a suffering that knows no cultural barriers’ (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009, p. 239), the story has the ability to engender sympathy to those affected from a reader who had little prior. However, Cummins’ lack of reference to the context of the situation, specifically regarding the role which the U.S. has had in creating/maintaining these flows of migrants/refugees, risks ‘engender[ing] contempt for Mexico as just another of Trump’s “shitholes,” a simple place of corruption and bloodbaths’ (Menkedick, 2020, para. 44.), as well as countries in CA/SA. By decontextualizing the reason behind the fecundity of violent masculinities present in situations of forced migration, those directly involved are easily ‘othered’ whilst those which create such an environment escape criticism, as Jaji discusses in reference to Africa (2021, p. 376). This makes Lydia’s gratitude towards the U.S. that much more perverse and harmful to helping AD’s readers develop a critical understanding of migration to the Southern U.S. border, nor a positive view of men from Mexico/CA/SA.

Conclusion

Using a gendered lens, I have shown that whilst the contentious AD may succeed in evoking sympathy from its target audience by educating them about some of the hardships Mexican/SA/CA migrants/refugees endure during their journey to the U.S., it falls short of critiquing the historical and structural factors which have caused and continued to exacerbate such flows. Consequently, I disagree with famous American author Sandra Cisneros’ heralding the book as ‘the great novel of las Americas’ (Cummins, 2020, blurb) and argue that a lack of contextualisation risks the novel’s readers implicitly ascribing the causes and hardships of migration to the emigrant’s country rather than the U.S. and its imperial legacy, patriarchal border agency and flawed immigration policies, undoing what could have been a novel with the potential to have fought ‘against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture’ as Cummins had originally wished (2020, cited in Obando, 2020, para. 8.). 

References

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Bowles, D. (2020) ‘American Dirt’ Is Proof the Publishing Industry Is Broken. Available at: (Accessed: 19.03.24).

Carlos, A. (2014) ‘Mexico “Under Siege”: Drug Cartels or U.S. Imperialism?’, Latin American Perspectives, 41(2), pp. 43-59. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X1350906

Cummins, J. (2020) American Dirt. London: Headline Publishing Group.

Domínguez, D. et al. (2022) ‘“They Treat Us Like We Are Not Human”: Asylum Seekers and “La Migra’s” Violence, Psychology of Violence, 12(4), pp. 241-251. doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/vio0000434

Fassin, D. (2009) The empire of trauma: an inquiry into the condition of victimhood. Princeton: University Press.

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Jaji, R. (2021) ‘“Aberrant” Masculinity: Men, Culture and Forced Migration’, in Mora, C. and Piper, N. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 373-386.

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Menkedick, S. (2020) American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere. Available at: (Accessed: 20.03.24).

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You can contact the author by email: msappe1@sheffield.ac.uk