‘American Dirt’ rings true in depiction of migrants’ lives
Novel about fleeing mother and son humanizes crisis
In recent years, freelance journalism assignments have taken me to immigration court, safe houses, water stations, forensic exhumation sites, Greyhound bus stations and a number of other places along the Texas-Mexico border. I’m often on the fringes between both sides, a geographical Venn diagram where the countries overlap, a space most people have never been to and can never really begin to imagine.
When you inhabit such spaces and talk to those who have fled the violence of their home country, it’s almost impossible to believe that anyone could subsist underneath the constant hum of insidious corruption and the clatter of more ferociously perilous realities. But people do, and I have talked to them, recorded their stories and tried just to begin to understand the terrors they escaped and the uncertainty they run toward in the shape of treacherous coyotes, the careening Bestia (the cargo trains that travel from Mexico to the United States), the threat of sex traffickers and other forms of exploitation, the punishing extremes of weather.
This is the space where Jeanine Cummins sets her meticulously researched novel “American Dirt.”
“A migrant dies every ninety minutes” somewhere in the world, Cummins writes in an author’s note. “So sixteen migrant deaths for each night I tuck my children into bed.”
“American Dirt” opens with 16 deaths — not of migrants but of the husband, mother and other family members of Lydia, the novel’s protagonist. Only she and her son Luca survive the violent attack perpetrated by the hit men of Javier Crespo Fuentes, the head of the drug cartel known as “Los Jardineros,” which controls life in Acapulco.
Lydia and Luca find themselves leaving their modest home for a long trek to the United States, a journey toward asylum and whatever can come next for her in a mostly inhospitable country.
The trauma Lydia and Luca endure is like another character that makes the journey with them. Lydia could never have imagined that she would be a migrant, that she would leave Mexico: “All her life she’s pitied those poor people.”
Now Lydia is one of those “poor people” and encounters many more just like herself and her son — leaving everything they’ve known behind, sleeping on benches, depending on the mercy of safe houses and anyone who can risk getting involved, fearing they, too, will be murdered.
As Lydia and Luca make their way from Acapulco to Mexico City and parts north, they encounter other travelers sympathetic to the pair. Some share what they know about the journey, offering warnings about hazards to avoid and tips on ways to be successful.
Two migrants, Rebeca and Soledad, are among the most memorable of this cast of characters. They tell the 8-yearold Luca exactly what to do to board the Bestia — it’s something of a physics lesson. They travel on the train only by day because the girls fear being among so many men in the darkness of night. When the train stops, they jump off, knowing they will catch the next one in the light of day.
The sisters accompany Lydia and Luca on the next legs of the journey, even negotiating with coyotes. They travel together for hundreds of miles. When they get to Nogales, across the border with Arizona, they feel as if they have arrived at last in the United States. Now they must face the noman’s land of the desert.
Cummins is of Puerto Rican descent, and in 2005 she married an undocumented immigrant. Her affinity for immigrants and their unpredictable destinies motivated her to write this novel.
She has done years of research into cartel violence and immigration issues. That scrupulousness shows in “American Dirt” — there is a precision in the characters she creates. They ring true, echoing the stories of Yesenia, Belinda, José and other immigrants from Mexico and Central America I’ve had occasion to interview in recent months.
The writing was stalled for a time by the death of Cummins’ father in 2016. But, she says, the “grief crater” created by his absence helped return her to the project.
She also was delayed by her own sense of inadequacy to tell the story. In her author’s note, she writes that the world has enough “violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement.” That’s certainly true, and books and movies and TV shows about cartels and narcotraficantes do little more than perpetuate the stereotypes of a one-dimensional, cartoonish Mexico.
The focus on Lydia and Luca in “American Dirt” humanizes the larger story — in the way that literature can. Cummins writes that her hope was “to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: those people are people.”
They are people who are not driven by whim or caprice but by desperation. They leave everything behind because they want to survive. Works of fiction and nonfiction alike can help us begin to understand the dire straits migrants are escaping but also the humanitarian cost that comes from an irremediably broken immigration system.