Obscuring these more complex factors in favor of the dramatic ones may achieve the immediate effect of eliciting the empathy of a large, and affluent, white audience. Shoot … Nice house, a little bling, a good-looking girl, and “Nah, I left all that behind in Guerrero … De verdad, new leaf.” The reader is asked right off the bat to judge him for his clothes and his tattoo and his past, and to be skeptical. It seems, however, that many people find it odd that she should be judged at all, because this is merely “a story.” This is where this particular debate about who gets to tell which stories becomes dangerous: It ignores the story itself. “Jeanine Cummins can write about Mexico — but she will be judged on whether her writing actually captures the experiential and emotional and ethical complexity of that place, and she will be judged with extra care because she is an outsider.”, Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (5,591 words). Yes, I see why people can race through it, why it seems like it generates empathy for migrants. It goes on and on. American Dirt, a realistic fiction novel about migrants, kept me interested the entire time. He noted that "it’s not that we think only Latinx writers should write Latinx-themed books. Sometimes, Cummins just comes straight out with her message as the narrator: Mexican kids, she tells us, “rich, poor, middle-class, have all seen bodies in the streets. !” In perhaps the most glaring example of just how problematic this red herring is, Zibby Owens writes on Medium, “I don’t care that Jeanine wasn’t a Mexican refugee herself — or even Mexican. The group is also demanding "investigation into discriminatory practices in the publishing industry at large. Lorenzo, de son vrai nom Jérémie Serrandour, est un des membres du collectif rennais Columbine, né à Brest en 1994. Similarly, Katherine Boo’s entire opus is full of characters who ask readers to stretch beyond reductive and dismissive narratives of empathy — in fact, she references and debunks these narratives in her phenomenal piece about Katrina, “Shelter and the Storm.” I have my nonfiction students read this at the beginning of each semester, and we discuss the “classic American dilemma” Boo describes: “the belief that ghettoizing a disadvantaged population is morally wrong, joined to the conviction that the disadvantaged population might be a lot happier in the next county.” We talk about Jasmine, the young girl at the heart of the story, who is struggling to find opportunity in this disaster, and her mom, whose contempt for her children is raw and brutal, and the host of other characters from New Orleans whose stories fit neither the popular narrative Boo highlights of deserving victimhood and redemption nor its opposite of irredeemable vice. "American Dirt," a novel that is Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick, has sparked a bitter controversy over its author's identity and portrayal of Mexican migrants. On January 29, 2020, Flatiron Books cancelled Cummins's book tour, citing threats to Cummins. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a 2019 Creative Nonfiction Writing Fellow. The problem is that Mexico isn’t a “new place” Jeanine Cummins can populate with “new people” through pure imagination. American Dirt is not art." The novel details the story of a woman and son fleeing Mexico, and two teenaged Latinas fleeing Honduras and traveling thru Mexico, all headed to the United States. Linda C Because apparently some people have their panties in a twist that the author is white. Chapter Summaries & Analyses . My marginalia in American Dirt is a trail of growing outrage, beginning with circles and question marks, progressing to “NOOOO!” “EW! 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