A migrant’s courage

American Dirt Jeanine Cummins Flatiron

At a bank in the border town of Nogales, a Mexican woman named Lydia attempts to withdraw cash from her dead mother’s account.

She needs $11,000 to pay a smuggler to lead her and her nine-year-old son into the U.S. But when the bank manager asks for documentation, Lydia can’t supply any. Less than two weeks earlier, her mother, her husband and the rest of her family were murdered. Lydia and her son, Luca, have been on the run since.

Up to this point, twothirds of the way through Jeanine Cummins’ controversial American Dirt,

I’d devoured the novel in a dry-eyed adrenalin rush. Lydia, Luca and the teenage Honduran sisters they’re travelling with leap on top of freight trains. They endure kidnapping, rape and the constant threat of death. “If there’s one good thing about terror,” Lydia thinks wryly, “it’s that it’s more immediate than grief.”

For a brief time, in the bank, Lydia allows the grief in. She looks at the manager and decides to tell her everything. In turn, the manager reveals that her nephew disappeared the previous year and was found with his head separated from his body. This encounter, the confession of private horrors within the formality of an office cubicle, affords a delicate, almost sacred moment. Outside, the characters’ survival depends on physical exertion and mental stamina, on stealth and luck and the disavowal of pain. Like the two women, I, too, seized the opportunity to weep.

Lydia’s blind spots come from her desire to maintain her way of life, as a middle-class mother who owns a bookstore in Acapulco. Even though her reporter husband publishes articles about drug cartel violence in “the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist,” Lydia has become accustomed to believing it wouldn’t touch her. American Dirt offers both a vital chronicle of contemporary Latin American migrant experience and a profoundly moving reading experience.