American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

(2019, Flatiron Press)

The buzz about American Dirt had been in my ears for a while, so like countless others, I put the book on hold at my library and joined a long queue. I waited months and months, for what? I honestly had no idea. Was the book a polemic on the poor quality of American soil? I didn’t know.

American Dirt opens up with a dramatic and gruesome scene of drug cartel operatives gunning down sixteen members of an investigative journalist's family at a quinceanera, the big party hosted for girls turning 15 in many Latin countries. Two people, the journalist's wife, Lydia Quixano Pérez, and their young son miraculously escape the carnage but immediately realize they must flee, far and fast. Otherwise, they too will be hunted down.

Meanwhile, they can trust no one. The cartel has eyes everywhere.

American Dirt traces their journey north from Acapulco as they flee detection, relying on their wits and the kindness of friends and strangers. It is both the story of their odyssey and that of the people they meet, including two vulnerable young sisters from Guatemala. 

Sometime around 1966, when I was six years old, the parents of the four children next door went to Acapulco on vacation. The mother, whose youngest was in kindergarten at the time, died while there. Although the death was from natural, not violent causes, the sudden loss of a parent and spouse set my neighbors’ world on its head in much the same way it did to Lydia and her son. Life as they knew it ceased to exist.

At the time of the carnage depicted in American Dirt, Lydia is a bookstore owner, a detail that especially endears her to those of us passionate about books. At one point, long before the massacre, a man, a handsome and particularly charming man, walks into her shop and over time, befriends the her. The ensuing relationship becomes a thread that weaves throughout the story and binds the pair in a regrettable fashion.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that I myself ventured to Mexico. I stayed in a high-rise hotel the first night, afraid to brush my teeth with anything other than bottled water. I recall a brain-crushing headache brought on by the city’s 7,382-foot elevation, how the next morning I took a taxi in bright sunshine, passing the cathedral on the square and vendors standing on the median, trying to eek out a living selling mangos, chewing gum, and churros. I was on my way to the airport, where I later stood amidst a crowd waiting to board a flight west to Michoacán. Once there I hopped a local bus and rode to a coastal town where a volunteer from Louisiana, Noelle, picked me up.

On the Pacific shore somewhere between Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, I spent a week volunteering with Laura, a Mexican wildlife biologist, tagging giant leatherback sea turtles who nested on the pristine beaches. We watched as a female lumbered up onto the dry sand beyond the high tide line before slowly carving out a nest with her back fins, then laying nearly 100 eggs, as what looked like tears fell from her eyes. We measured the turtles, some six feet in length, noted a tag number, if there was one, and gave one if not. As soon as the turtle swept the sand over the deep hole and began her return to the sea, we volunteers dug up the eggs and transported them to Laura’s nursery, a place that protected them from poachers, who harvest the eggs to sell as aphrodisiacs. This theme people of preying on the defenseless is seen throughout American Dirt, and indeed, wherever the rule of law is not in force.

In 2009, while on assignment to report about Mexico’s Tequila Trail for the New York Daily News, I saw a different side of the predator/prey scenario. On the family estate in a small town in Jalisco, I met the scion of a distillery family who was under armed protection at all times because his wealth made him a prime kidnapping target. Seated next to each other at a luncheon, we chatted about Manhattan, where I lived at the time, and where he had an apartment. In not so many words, he told me that he never felt safe and free until he landed at Kennedy Airport. In the States, he was not always looking over his shoulder. In countries without the rule of law, sometimes even the very rich live in terror.

Learning to cut agave for tequila in 2009, Guadalajara, Mexico. The non dominant hand is held behind the back so that the machete does not dismember the harvester.

Back in Michoacán in the late 1990s, our duties were to patrol the beaches at night, for safety reasons always in pairs, looking for turtles emerging from the Pacific ready to lay their eggs. One time we encountered a female who had lost most of one of her rear flippers, likely to an attack of some sort, but the stump still made the motions of digging the nest, which she somehow managed to do with just one posterior flipper.

In the mornings after our nighttime turtle patrols, we watched cattle graze adjacent to the beach along a coastline undeveloped as far as the eye could see. On the other side of the coastal road, jungle stretched for miles. During the afternoon we relaxed on hammocks strung between palms and later swam in a fresh water pond in lieu of a shower. During the evening hours, sated by Noelle’s Cajun cooking, we retreated to our tents to rest before our late night patrols, as her alcohol-fueled temper escalated.

Any subsequent forays I made into Mexico over the years were the antithesis of the American Dirt’s protagonist and her son heading north into the U.S. fleeing the cartel, yet my visits south of the border made me better understand how people on the fringes, living without sufficient means or protection of the law, try to survive.

Of the hundred or so eggs the female Giant Leatherback lays, only a few hatchlings will survive to adulthood. If the eggs stay out of the poachers’ hands, those that hatch will be swept up by countless predators as they scurry into the sea weeks later. Once in the water, they become, for the most part, simply part of the food web. Precious few survive until adulthood. Any females who do will someday return to the same beach to lay their eggs. Like the hatchlings, few migrants successfully make their way to safety in the U.S., especially in these days of detention centers.

Lydia and her son, though fictional, are part of a real life mass exodus seeking safety. Their journey, not unlike 1500-pound Giant Leatherback sea turtle’s emergence from the sea to the nesting area, is monumental. Propelled by flippers rendered essentially useless out of the water, the turtle inches her way up past the high tide mark. Like a migrant crossing the desert under the cover of darkness, the fate of her offspring is uncertain. If the sea turtle’s beach is dark enough, she will nest successfully. (Lights confuse the reptile. If she sees light, she will return to the sea without laying her clutch.) Yet even when she nests successfully and her clutch hatches, the odds of her offsprings’ survival are minuscule, similar to those trying to cross onto American soil.

For most mothers in the States and other first world countries, seeking safety is not the minute to minute mandate that it is for those who live in places of violence, whether it is in lands where cartels, not the rule of law, preside, or places where gang violence, domestic abuse, famine, and food insecurity, among other issues, prevail.

Compelling stories of migration, especially of those escaping violence, have been captured in film for decades. El Norte, a 1983 drama, followed the border crossing of a brother and sister who fled a massacre in Guatemala and migrated illegally to Los Angeles. The 2014 documentary short Riding the Beast traced the migration of a 13 year old boy on ‘La Bestia,’ the beast, a freight train that travels north and was/is a preferred method of transit for many migrants. 

When I worked as a gardener in New York City’s Central Park in the late 1990s, many of my co-workers had emigrated to the United States for a better life. My best friend, Maurico, one of the best teachers I have ever had, left El Salvador as a young man. I don’t know for certain, but I believe he told me he crossed the border and made his way to Los Angeles undetected. I always thought of him and the countless other immigrants I met when I reflected on President Donald J. Trump’s words about immigrants from the the southern borders being ‘drug dealers, criminals, [and] rapists.’

Sometime around 2005, I joined a group of Habitat for Humanity alumni who were providing materials and assistance building homes for the working poor outside of Tijuana, Mexico. Countless church groups do this type of service, and the work of our group, One Small House, continues to this day. In the early days, we would bunk in an orphanage where children whose parents were either too poor, too sick, or perhaps in jail, had left them to be cared for. On some builds, we would construct two homes, and one time, even a clinic for the people in the community.

It was our custom to distribute rice, beans, and cooking oil to people whom we had built for in the past, and while it was easy to get teary when the keys to a newly constructed home would be handed over to the owner, what was not easy to notice was how rail thin the children were during the food and clothing distributions we made. I remember seeing a brown lunch bag with half a sandwich in it on the back seat of the van. A friend, who had grown up in Ireland in the 1950s and 60s and who knew about kids who were painfully thin and hungry, pointed out the young girl who eyed that lunch bag. I, always the hyper-observant one, had failed to see the thinnest of arms peeking out of a body otherwise camouflaged by baggy clothes. It was right there in front of me, and I hadn’t seen it. Now, I always try to be aware of what I don’t see, especially beyond our borders.

American Dirt sheds further nuance on the un-staunched hemorrhaging of refugees understandably seeking safety on American soil. In their shoes, who among us would not do the same? In a page-turning frenzy, American Dirt puts a human face on a true humanitarian crisis.

What have been your experiences and observations about people fleeing their homeland for a better/safer life elsewhere?

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