American Dirt
A mother and her eight-year-old son, pursued by a drug lord, take the deadly route north from Acapulco, and so another terrible tale of migration unfolds...
by Jeanine Cummins (Flatiron Books 2020)
This novel with an intriguing title, begins in a bathroom in Acapulco, Mexico. Lydia, mother, of eight-year-old Luca, pushes him even harder against the two walls in a narrow stall that serves as a space to take a shower in, and covers his body with hers ‘like a tortoise’s shell’. It is some time in the early 2000’s. The beautiful seaside city of Acapulco has lost its shine for tourists. Drug cartels rule; the cruellest forms of killing and maiming take place on the streets in clear view of men, women, and children. Lydia and her husband Sebastian, like many local residents, dared not even go out to restaurants to spend a relaxing evening together. In the bathroom Lydia and Luca hear gun shots pierce the air. Sebastian and another 15 of Lydia’s family members have gathered in the courtyard for the quinceañera of her niece, and Lydia the ‘tortoise shell’ mother, succeeds in saving the life of Luca, and with it, her own – the only two survivors of the carnage.
As Lydia surveys the dead bodies—16 of her family members in her mother’s courtyard—she is grateful that they were murdered by bullets, and not by the more commonly used methods of axe, spade, machete, sickle, and hook: ‘the simple instruments of hacking and trenching’ deployed by a cartel that calls itself ‘The Gardeners.’ Spending only a few minutes to bid a last farewell to the bloodied bodies of her loved ones in the presence of police, who are paid by these cartels, Lydia and Luca hasten to take to the road without a plan. They are being pursued. Without Luca dead, and Lydia captured, the killer would not have succeeded in his work. Their pursuer is none other than ‘The Owl’ – who received this moniker because he has eyes everywhere, and he is the leader of ‘The Gardeners’. Javier was a favourite client, who dropped into the bookshop Lydia owned to share coffee and conversation; a closet poet who read his mediocre poetry aloud to her; father of a teenage daughter who he loved more than his life. They became close friends. On her last birthday, she discovered that her journalist husband Sebastian, who was on a mission to report on the cartels, was on the verge of publishing a story on ‘The Owl’ and, to her shock and horror, that the latter was none other than her dear friend Javier.
Now Javier, once beloved friend, has murdered Lydia’s family in cold blood, and, she suspects wants to kill her son too. Running away from him seems next to impossible for, ‘The Owl’ has eyes across the length and breadth of Mexico. To get to know what soured the relationship between the friends Javier and Lydia to this extent, the reader will have to turn several pages. The author sets this powerful gangster up against the mother whose instincts to save her child are primeval. A future for mother and son in Mexico is impossible, so Lydia decides on an impulse to head to ‘El Norte’ – the United States of America. Luca, a child gifted in geography knows it is 1600 miles to the border, and Lydia learns that if Javier does not succeed in their capture and annihilation, there are others – thieves, rapists, mercenaries disguised as police, and extortionists – all of whom they do encounter; there is ‘El Bestia’, the only possible way to cover the distance, which is to ride atop speeding freight trains as they make their way northwards; and should they survive all of this and at the border, still have enough money left to pay the exorbitant price demanded by the coyote—the guide to take them over— then the Sonoran desert awaits, where one could meet one’s end because of thirst, exhaustion, or get left behind because as the coyote makes clear, the group he is escorting will walk, keep silent, stop, or hide when he gives the signal, and not otherwise. For, another ‘owl’ awaits them while they journey across the desert – the US patrol with its perennial searchlights and guns. And finally, there are the vagaries of the weather, with its own surprises as well as the hostile flora and fauna.
This narrative of hot pursuit is an action-packed read, for the many moments the reader has to hold her breath and hope that mother and son escape being picked up by one of Javier’s henchmen, or emerge unharmed and together from the several extreme dangers they face. There is little let up in the tension. Just as one begins to relax, the author steals up behind one with the next situation or character and the tension is back. For example, on the top of a freight train speeding northwards, a young man who had been staring at Lydia approaches her and shows her a photo of herself with Javier smiling—taken obviously in other circumstances—and informs her that he used to work for Javier, which is why he received it, as thousands like him have. ‘The Owl’, like her, travels atop ‘El Bestia’ too.
Along with Lydia, Luca and her newfound pursuer, the roofs of ‘El Bestia’ are occupied by migrants of all hues: the beautiful teenage sisters, Soledad and Rebecca, who fled Honduras and their loving parents, when a gangster took Soledad as a ‘girlfriend’ and raped her whenever he felt like. He then threatened to annihilate her family if she told anyone and began to take an interest in Rebecca too; there are the economic migrants, able bodied men, who routinely cross over to ‘El Norte’, work there, are caught without papers, deported back to various South American countries and after a while go back again. Each time, these economic migrants use the same means of transport, which is to jump onto a running freight train as it heads northwards and sit on the roof until it is time to get off, and walk, or wait indefinitely for the next one to jump onto - a skill both Lydia and Luca acquire with the help of their new found family in the sisters Soledad and Rebecca. Needless to say, not everyone survives this feat, which is how ‘El Bestia’ gets its name.
After the opening pages describing the carnage, the pursuit and the journey of mother and son is interspersed with the back story of Lydia, her husband Sebastian, their son Luca and the drug lord, Javier. As these parallel narratives proceed, the motivation behind Javier’s acts of murder and pursuit become clear. To my mind, the power of this novel of 400 pages lies not in Cummins’ use of language, which I found quite simple and straightforward and not particularly skillful but in the suspense she builds up. As one can imagine, from the very first page, I felt a growing empathy for Lydia and Luca, and for other characters on the migrant route; the horror of what they faced and continue to. You want them to make t and so you read. There is some space for empathy for Javier, the antagonist revealing individual vulnerabilities, and also the effect that societies and cultures have on human beings. The characterisation of the children and teens left one wanting to be their mother, since they have no tantrums and no meltdowns! I was intrigued by the title, and before I read the book, I thought ‘dirt’ was meant as a derogatory term for migrants in the way that some politicians across the world use language to talk about them. However, there is one passage when one of the major characters clutches ‘American dirt literally in her fist.’ Is ‘American dirt’ at that moment replaced by ‘American dream’? Perhaps the title has several meanings.
Cummins claims she spent several years researching this book, travelling to and even staying in places on this particular migrant route. It was set up to be a great success by its publishers and the novel was compared to The Grapes of Wrath. Although I enjoyed the read, it did not, to my mind come anywhere close to The Grapes of Wrath (see my review on Substack). It does not have the depth of language, nor the sophistication of form; the scope of that historical moment which also resonates across time; and certainly not the complexity of characterisation so evident in Steinbeck’s work. Soon after its publication, Cummins received a lot of criticism from Hispanic writers, who point to the many ways her ignorance of Mexico, it’s people, language, culture and topography are reflected in the book. These writers are also furious at the publishing industry in America, which, they claim, prefers to bring their stories to the world through ‘white Americans’ rather than ‘native Hispanic’ writers. Oprah chose American Dirt for her book club and after the barrage of criticism it received, she invited some Hispanic writers, North American publishers and Cummins, and moderated a conversation to give each a voice on the issues raised. It was interspersed with documentary footage of the border and migration across it. This is definitely worth viewing.
The ‘appropriation’ of stories and who writes about who, which is a very present debate, is not the focus of my review. As an outsider and a reader who comes to this novel with an open mind, I have no opinions on the points raised by Hispanic writers. I would say that despite its shortcomings, and especially at this time, when migrants across the world from Myanmar to the United States, not to forget Europe, where I live, are getting the blame for everything that isn’t going well in our lives, it is a story that at least reminds us that many migrants —just as the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath and in this book —often feel compelled to undertake the enormous risks they do in order to escape a life of degradation, and imminent death for themselves and those they love. Each of these characters and the situations they face are evidence of the utter tragedy of being forced to leave home for places one is not wanted, or even hated. And this tragedy seems to be playing out for an ever-increasing number of people as conflicts, economic disparity and climate change drive them to fight for survival.
My rating
Link to an interview with Cummins on NPR