While some have hailed 'American Dirt' as a poignant and humanizing tale of one migrant family’s harrowing journey to America, others have slammed it as harmful and careless cultural appropriation.
Jeanine Cummins’ ‘American Dirt’ has polarized audiences with its depictions of migrants. Now, Latinx readers are tweeting their own parody narratives.Skeptics have accused Cummins — who was born in Spain, raised in Maryland and identifies as white and Latina — and the American publishing industry as a whole of stifling real migrant voices while fetishizing and capitalizing on their suffering.
“How Mexican am I? My dad was a taco; my mother a piñata. I was born on Cinco de Mayo, Mexico’s most holy day,”on Twitter. “When I was 4, I was being trained to run drugs for the cartel but I knew I wanted to be a dancer. So, I started my trip to the U.S.” During her “Oprah’s Book Club” reveal on Tuesday’s “CBS This Morning,” Cummins defended herself, explaining that even she questioned whether she had the right to tell this story, until she conducted extensive research on the subject, consulted with a Chicano studies expert and visited the border.
“I always knew that I wanted to write about immigration,” she said during the segment. “I was interested in that topic, and I resisted, for a very long time, telling the story from a migrant’s point of view because I was worried that I didn’t know enough — that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths.”
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