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American Dirt

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

American Dirt: Introduction

American dirt: plot summary, american dirt: detailed summary & analysis, american dirt: themes, american dirt: quotes, american dirt: characters, american dirt: symbols, american dirt: theme wheel, brief biography of jeanine cummins.

Historical Context of American Dirt

Other books related to american dirt.

• Full Title: American Dirt
• When Written: 2013–2018
• When Published: January 21, 2020
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Novel, Thriller, Migrant Literature
• Setting: Mexico, Arizona, Maryland
• Climax: Lydia, Luca, and a group of migrants undertake a clandestine journey on foot across the border between Mexico and the United States.
• Antagonist: Javier Crespo Fuentes
• Point of View: Third-Person Omniscient

Extra Credit for American Dirt

Is All Press Really Good Press? Many consider Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt to be one of the most controversial publications in recent history. For the most part, the controversy is due to publicity: preceding publication, American Dirt ’s publisher celebrated the book as “the defining novel” of an era because of its depiction of clandestine migration. In response, a group of outspoken Latino writers and activists (specifically #DignidadLiterary) denounced the work as cultural appropriation (among other accusations), spurring heated conversations about representation gaps and other issues plaguing the publishing industry.

Persistence Pays Off. Jeanine Cummins has stated in an interview she started writing American Dirt in 2013, a full seven years before it was finally published. In fact, she revealed that she’d submitted two failed drafts before hitting her stride. Eventually, the novel was part of a three-day, nine-house auction that resulted in a seven-figure advance for the author.

American Dirt

59 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 14-18

Chapters 19-22

Chapters 23-25

Chapters 26-29

Chapter 30-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

American Dirt is a work of fiction by Jeanine Cummins published in 2020 by MacMillan Press. This guide refers to the first US edition. The controversial, cross-genre novel combines elements of a commercial thriller, literary fiction, suspense, and romance. The title refers to the land comprising the geopolitical entity that is the United States of America, and to the contempt undocumented migrants face both before and after crossing the US-Mexico border. While many critics initially praised the book for its propulsive plot and poignant treatment of an underrepresented group, others objected to its portrayal of Mexicans; characterizing the novel as stereotypical, opportunistic, and parasitical; while also accusing Cummins of cultural appropriation. A vitriolic debate centering on who can tell which stories emerged in the press and on social media, prompting the publisher to cancel Cummins’s book tour. The book is written in alternating third-person viewpoints. Its moral voice unequivocally lands on the side of migrants, while its simple language creates a sense of immediacy and conveys the terror of the migrant experience.

Plot Summary

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Lydia Quixano Pérez , a bookstore owner in Acapulco, saves her son Luca from a massacre that wipes out their entire family at a quinceañera cookout. The perpetrators are three sicarios , killers for Los Jardineros, a violent local cartel. Javier Crespo Fuentes , Lydia’s close friend and the jefe of Los Jardineros, ordered the hit in retaliation for an exposé written by Lydia’s husband, a journalist named Sebastián Pérez Delgado . Javier’s murderous rage stems not from the article itself, but from the impact it has on his daughter, Marta, who commits suicide when she learns of her father’s true identity. Lydia and Luca spend the rest of the novel running from Javier’s men, encountering a diverse cast of migrants along the road to the US.

Lydia gathers necessities from her mother’s house and takes Luca to a hotel using several buses to throw off Los Jardineros. Despite her precautions, a clerk recognizes her and informs Javier. The next morning, Lydia receives a gift from the jefe with a thinly veiled threat. She and Luca flee Acapulco by bus, stopping in Chilpancingo to avoid roadblocks before pressing on to Mexico City. From the capital, they travel by commuter train to Huehuetoca, where Luca witnesses the aftermath of a sexual assault at a migrant facility. The rapist is Lorenzo , a sicario for Los Jardineros. Fearful of Lorenzo, Lydia takes Luca to the train tracks where they meet two beautiful adolescent sisters named Soledad and Rebeca. Luca notices Lorenzo on the train. The sicario recognizes Lydia but claims he is no longer in Los Jardineros and means her no harm. The sisters invite Lydia and Luca to travel with them.

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Lydia, Luca, and the sisters leave Lorenzo behind in Guadalajara and ride La Bestia , freight trains used by migrants, through dangerous Sinaloa territory. Immigration agents intercept the train and load all the migrants except Soledad and Rebeca into vans. When the sisters join the others in a warehouse hours later, it is clear they have been raped. As the only Mexican nationals in the group, Lydia and Luca meet with the commander, who demands a toll for their release. Luca refuses to leave the sisters behind, which prompts Lydia to pay their toll and leaves her penniless. The group meets Beto , a vivacious, asthmatic deportee who is flush with cash.

Soledad contacts a coyote named El Chacal when they arrive in Nogales. He agrees to add Lydia, Luca, and Beto to the group crossing the border , but Lydia does not have enough money. Beto volunteers to pay the difference. The migrants face their first challenge a few hours into the trek when they spy a US Border Patrol drone. Shortly thereafter, they encounter a group of armed vigilantes on the lookout for migrants and an immigration official. Other challenges arise, including a sudden storm and a flash flood that ends the journey north for two members of the group. Lorenzo tries to rape Rebeca, prompting Soledad to shoot him. Lydia finds Lorenzo’s phone and learns he offered her and Luca to Javier in exchange for his freedom from Los Jardineros. The book reaches its climax when Lydia confronts Javier over videocall and Beto dies of an asthma attack. The remaining migrants reach a campsite run by El Chacal’s contacts who drive them to Tucson in hidden compartments in their RVs. The novel ends in Maryland, where Lydia and Luca share a house with Soledad, Rebeca, and the sisters’ relatives. 

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American Dirt

By jeanine cummins.

Book review and synopsis for American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, a controversial novel about a timely and important topic.

In American Dirt , after her journalist husband runs afoul of cartel boss Javier Fuentes, Lydia’s entire family is murdered with the exception of her young son, Luca. Now, Lydia and Luca must run for their lives to try to leave Mexico despite the many dangers lurking along the difficult journey and with Fuentes and his men nipping at their heels.

Action-packed and suspenseful, American Dirt is a thriller that tells a story about migration into the United States.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

Lydia Quixano's entire family is gunned down after her journalist husband, Sebastian , publishes an expose on a cartel boss, Javier Fuentes . Javier is the leader of Los Jardineros and had also been a close personal friend of Lydia's. She met him as a customer at her bookstore. Lydia and her 8-year-old son Luca are the sole survivors in the attack, and they must flee Mexico.

Lydia and Luca travel north by bus from Acapulco to Chilpancingo to find Carlos , a friend of Sebastian's. Carlos's wife Meredith puts them in a van pretending to be with a group of American missionaries to get to Mexico City. The goal is to fly to a border city to cross, but at the airport, Lydia has no documentation for Luca. Instead, they continue on foot to Huehuetoca and stay at a migrant shelter. They come across two teen girls, Soledad and Rebeca , who teach them how to get on and off La Bestia, a freight train that migrants commonly hitch a ride on, though it requires jumping onto a moving train. Soledad and Rebeca are from Honduras and are fleeing from a gang leader who has taken an interest in them. Soledad is pregnant by rape. They are headed to Maryland, where their cousin Cesar lives.

On La Bestia, they meet Lorenzo , a man who was part of Los Jardineros and recognizes Lydia as a target they're after, but Lorenzo claims that he is fleeing that lifestyle. Lorenzo tells Lydia that Javier's daughter Marta killed herself three days after learning the secret about her father. At a shelter, the two girls call home to find out their father was stabbed by the man they are running from.

Back on board La Bestia, they ride until immigration agents raid the train. They are then rounded up and taken to a warehouse. As Mexican nationals, Lydia and Luca are free to go (with payment), but Luca demands that they save Soledad and Rebeca. They give up the rest of their money to save them. Soledad miscarries. They continue riding La Bestia and meet a asthmatic, migrant 10-year-old boy, Beto. Together, they all go to Nogales to meet the girls' coyote, El Chacal. Lydia clears out her mother's bank account to pay him $11,000 for her and Luca. They soon find out Lorenzo has hired the same coyote and will be making the two-day journey with them, along with 8 others.

16 days after departing Acapulco, Lydia and Luca cross the border into the United States, but they still have a long trek ahead. One man party breaks his leg and his godfather stays with him so they can go turn themselves into border patrol (as opposed to dying in the desert). The next day, Lorenzo attempts to assault Rebeca, and Soledad shoots him with El Chacal's gun. Lydia finds Lorenzo's cell phone and discovers Lorenzo has been reporting her location to Javier. She calls Javier to tell him that Lorenzo is dead and to leave her alone. In the final leg of the trip, Beto dies from his asthma.

In the epilogue on month later, Lydia and Luca move to Maryland to live with Soledad and Rebeca at their cousin Cesar's house. Lydia gets a job as a house cleaner and the girls are enrolled in school.

For more detail, see the full Section-by-Section Summary .

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Book Review

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins has been the most talked about novel of the new decade so far (though keep in mind that I’m writing this in January 2020), for both good reasons and bad. It was sold in what was reported to be a seven-figure deal and has a movie in the works. It also received praise from a lot of big names like Stephen King, Sandra Cisneros, Ophrah and various literary gatekeepers.

As for the negative buzz, well, there’s been a lot of that, too. More accurately, it’s been accused of being a one-dimensional portrayal of Mexico and being exploitative. Commentators have also pointed out factual inaccuracies about Mexico, an over-reliance on stereotypes, and the strange foreign gaze that the Mexican protagonist has.

So, what’s the deal, and should you read this novel? Since most of the reviews thus far have been largely polarized, either a) willfully ignorant of any criticisms, or b) focused almost entirely on its flaws, I was curious to take a look.

Oprah’s Book Club Pick

The Good Stuff

American Dirt is very much a thriller in that there’s plenty of chases, suspense and a lot of action in the novel. The backstory for the characters and the writing are superior to your standard thriller. Parul Segal wrote a review of it that (accurately) lambastes some of the writing as being tortured or otherwise questionable , but honestly it’s still a large step up from your average thriller. It’s maybe a bit long-winded, but really I think most people will be fine with the writing.

If I hadn’t known about the criticisms, it would not have seemed overtly apparent to me that the book was problematic (with some exceptions, see below). There wasn’t a ton that stuck out to me when I first started reading, beyond a standard level of nit-picks. I would have wondered about the accuracy in general, but I wouldn’t know one way or another since I am neither from Mexico or of Mexican heritage.

To be clear, this is not a book where no effort has been made to do any research. Parts of the novel contain many details which clearly are the result of diligent research. For example, there’s much specificity in discussing conditions on La Bestia, a freight train, and the impact of Programa Frontera Sur, a joint U.S.-Mexican funded initiative to keep migrants off the train. And yet, it’s unfortunate that the result is still a book that has some issues (see below).

The book also does try to incorporate a range of experiences and types of migrants in order to paint a fuller picture of the experience of trying to cross the border, though the main focus is on the journey from Mexico (as opposed to from Central America) since that’s where the story is set. It’s clear the plot has been contorted to some extent to bring in these aspects of the story, but I can understand why Cummins would try to do this. I do think she did a good job of working these things into the narrative. (But of course, how accurate any of these depictions are is questionable, so I take it all with a grain of salt.)

Criticisms & Controversy

In terms of the story, there are quite a few questionable plot decisions and characterizations. Everyone is either a murderer/rapist or a saint, and the characters rarely have to make hard decisions. Our protagonist Lydia is especially saintly, and yet also kind of stupid. Why would she think it wasn’t necessary to have any safety precautions with her husband publishing an expose on a cartel boss? Why does she rely on begging for food when she has thousands of pesos on hand and hundreds of thousands in the bank? Why doesn’t she (a middle-class woman) know that you need documentation to ride a plane?

Meanwhile, Lydia’s son Luca is eight years old but says stuff like “your help would be a significant advantage” when asking for help. Luca also lashes out at random guards, criminals and whatnot, and they all laugh it off because they find him so cute and precocious. I’ve never tried crossing the border, but my instinct is that acting brash, but cute is not a great strategy.

A bigger issue that other reviewers have pointed out is Lydia’s “ foreign gaze ” when it comes to journeying through Mexico. Her reactions do seem oddly similar to how a foreigner would react to situations. Additionally, a noticeably irritating aspect of the story is the repeated references to “brown” skin. It’s just “skin,” okay? Unless there’s something noteworthy about the color, you can just refer to it as “skin.”

Cultural Inaccuracies

In terms of the cultural inaccuracies, I’m not from Mexico or of Mexican heritage so I can’t really assess how accurate the depiction of Mexico is. I will instead rely on what other reviewers have said. Four widely shared articles that are critical of the book can be found here , here , here and here .

For example, an issue that’s been brought up is the stereotypes about Mexico that many feel are pervasive throughout the book. There seems to be a common commentary that it paints Mexico as only being overrun with drugs, crime or corruption and not much else. Furthermore, Cummins throws in a wide range of stereotypically Mexican/Mexican-ish things. Just in the first few chapters, things like quinceañeras, Carne asada, random Spanish words, and so on all make appearances. I’d imagine its similar to if someone wrote a book about an American family that dresses in red, white and blue, eats hot dogs all the time and decorates their house with pictures of eagles.

Another example of the lack of authenticity that has been pointed out by a reviewer on Amazon . The characters wonder why a gang leader is nicknamed “La Lechuza”, which means “the owl”, since owls aren’t scary. The reviewer clarifies that a “lechuza” is more specifically a screech owl that has been considered an omen and harbinger of death in Mexican culture for thousands of years, which any Mexican would know (according to that person).

Of course, the sad fact is that literature, including stuff taught in schools, is rife with inaccuracies and inaccurate portrayals of places or people. Some books, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , are blatantly problematic. Others, like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls , on further inspection, misrepresent the societies they are depicting and contradict historical records. And then there’s stuff like Robinson Crusoe where it’s a classic but few reading it would assume it was ever meant to be a fact-based story. But these stories all end up shaping our perceptions nonetheless, so it seems like we should be striving for something better.

I also think reviewers should be more honest about what they don’t know. People need to be allowed to write about cultures they are not a part of, or review books from heritages that are not their own. However, when a non-Mexican writer publishes a book about Mexico and a non-Mexican reviewer declares its “authenticity,” any responsible editor should find that highly suspect.

Writing About Other Cultures

As mentioned above, in my opinion, writers must be able to write about people outside of themselves. That said, I think that comes with it the burden of doing the work to portray other cultures or people accurately and responsibly. Furthermore, for sensitive topics, I think that burden is especially high. (If a publisher is worried about that burden, finding writers that have first-hand experience is always an option!)

For example, they have the responsibility to ensure that it’s not full of stereotypes or otherwise exploitative. Unfortunately, American Dirt is guilty of both these things. It leans on stereotypes about Mexico and the treatment of the subject matter feels exploitative to a lot of people. I can certainly see why a publisher choosing to promote a book on a sensitive topic of great importance and relevance without proper diligence would feel extremely exploitative to people who know that place and have lived that pain.

When reporters shove a microphone in someone’s face after they’ve experienced trauma, it’s exploitative. In much the same way, misrepresenting the story and culture of immigrants when those people are currently under attack by U.S. leaders (and using the symbols of their trauma as decoration as parties, see below) shows very poor judgement.

One thing I’ll say in Cummin’s defense is that I doubt she imagined when she submitted the book that it would end up being this large of a release. It’s not to say that it excuses whatever inaccuracies entirely, but I imagine if she’d known it would be so widely read and if she’d had the resources she has now, perhaps some parts of the book would have been shaped differently. And the decision to promote this specific book (over other more authentic voices) is ultimately up to the publisher, not the author. I’ll finally add that I think book twitter has gotten too vitriolic. There is a difference between being critical and being hateful .

More Controversy and Barbed Wire Centerpieces

To make matters worse, the Flatiron Books launch party for American Dirt made the extremely questionable decision to feature barbed wire centerpieces. Honestly, who thought this was a good idea? Would you use nooses as decor to launch a book about America’s racist history? Or small planes as decor for a book about September 11?

Barbed Wire Centerpieces, From Flatiron Book’s American Dirt Launch Party

I don’t doubt that there were many people with only pure intentions in the publishing process. But stuff like this really does reinforce the idea that this is just a big publishing house capitalizing on and exploiting the pain of immigrants without any genuine concern for their plight.

(Author Jeanine Cummins also had a manicure — mirror here in case that link goes down — that many found objectionable.)

Read it or Skip it?

Obviously, a book can be two things at once. American Dirt is a book that tells a well-paced story that is timely and accessible. However, it’s also a book that has many issues and inaccuracies. I wouldn’t rely on it to enhance your understanding of Mexico, and while it does contain some information about the difficulties migrants face, I would also take it all with a grain of salt.

(Furthermore, there are clearly systemic issues that allowed those problems to be ignored on its way to publication. And I think recommending this book without making others aware of the problems with it is a little irresponsible.)

Aside from any cultural stuff, it doesn’t take an expert to know that this story lacks realism in parts. The characterizations are questionable, and there’s an odd lack of hard decisions that need to be made in this situation that necessitates hard decisions. This is not to say the story isn’t suspenseful or interesting for people who enjoy thrillers, though.

I would love to hear others’ opinions on this book! Feel free to drop a comment below. I promise to give any (civil) comment genuine, open-minded consideration, especially when it comes to opposing perspectives. Happy reading!

See American Dirt on Amazon .

Similar Titles

For some other titles dealing in similar territory, check out The Devil’s Highway by Mexican author Luis Alberto Urrea, Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Colombian author Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, or The Affairs of the Falcóns by Melissa Rivero.

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What an excellent,and balanced piece this is! Having got my own copy and feeling quite awkward about reading and reviewing it,I absolutely feel you nailed both the issues and the responsibilities so well.

Thank you! and yes, I totally agree this was one of the harder reviews to write given that so many people have strong feelings about it and there’s a lot of external stuff going on around it. Thanks for reading!

It’s refreshing to read a balanced review of this book! It doesn’t sound like something I’ll add to my tbr pile, but I’m happy to have read your review.

thank you and thank you for reading! :)

Interesting review, there is certainly a lot of hype and negative press about the book around.

thank you — yeah there’s definitely a lot of commentary about it right now to sift through!

I kept hearing about all the controversy surrounding this book but didn’t have time to read any articles until today, so yours is the first that I’ve read. I really appreciate your suggestions of other, similar books to read as well as the links to four critics. The first link had some book suggestions. Links 2 & 3 seem to take me to the same article?

It was enough for me to hear all the complaints about the bad writing. I will pass on American Dirt for that reason alone.

I made myself a Goodreads shelf called American Dirt opposition and added the books you and Myriam Gurba mentioned to it.

Hi Jinjer — thank you for letting me know about the messed up links, it’s been fixed! Thanks for reading!

I agree with the author’s objections to the book. However, I would not say it’s poorly written, not on the sentence level. I find much of the writing to be strong. The metaphors and word choices are often beautiful.

Thank you for this balanced review, Jennifer! I haven’t read this book, nor am I going to soon… But I’m seeing this going on for about a year now, how an author is also abused instead of only criticised. I think these are the pitfalls of a connected age. And the book has been tagged as a fiction, domestic fiction, thriller. What exactly has happened to the understanding of creative liberties? Middle East has been, is still being, in certain respects, misrepresented. But does it mean that we stop reading works of fiction and appreciating them? I’m from India and knowing the reality about my country, if some author only considers one aspect for their book and sweeps aside all the other things, then I won’t of course treat it as a misrepresentation. And in this connected age, neither will anyone else as long as they read the world news! It is, after all, a work of fiction. I don’t understand the hue and cry.

I started reading this book and since I have been living in Mexico for 15 years, could easily see the errors in the plot story. When I realized Lydia was planning to take the train, I stopped reading to question both the author and the purpose of this book. Thanks for your review. When I saw it was a thriller I realized why the author, not understanding Mexico would distort life here. I do think there is some irresponsible actions of promoting this book because the US main stream media publishes so many false statements about Mexico and this book and this book does the same. I don’t plan to finish the book I don’t read thrillers

My OPINION 1. It shows that what happened to Lydia, a misjudgment of character, trusting those on “face” value, Love Is Blind etc, can happen to anyone “in general”. She was a typical hard working loving mother daughter aunt…that LIFE’s dark side threw curves!

2. It is a “light hearted” look at a horrific topic that too many sheltered people choose to ignore thus I APPLAUD this protected eye opening novel

3. I cannot even watch war or fight sequences and books like this that are too real will not even be given a chance…Luca is a complex character that is delightful and offers a relief and hope just when things need which is not “real”. Unreal books about REAL life circumstance the privileged cannot even begin to ingest let alone digest, crates the perfect taste to wet the appetite for more.

I’m currently reading this book and as someone who is mexican, this book has created mixed feelings for me. I don’t question Jeanine’s freedom of expression, I just wished this book was well researched. There were many missed opportunities through out the book where she could elaborate. I just don’t like the concept of a middle aged woman with lots of money in the bank crossing the country, into the United states and suddenly everything is okay. This book also doesn’t do justice of explaining the beauty that Mexico has. Yes Mexico is controlled by drug cartels, but there is beauty on those lands. There are excellent food options, beautiful buildings from the 1500s, and beautiful beaches. However, I believe this book has become a catalyst for creating the conversation of what is an immigrant, and leading readers to other Latinx stories that are far better than American Dirt.

I was entertained by this book. Though I don’t believe it as a completely accurate portrayal of Mexico and immigrant plight, it still brings awareness to the issue. I think some of the criticisms are justified but I agree with you that they have gotten out of control- some people ARE downright hateful (read Myriam Gurba). I think maybe the people that are uber defensive just don’t like that the dangerous and frightening aspects of their country are being highlighted.

Jules Verne once wrote a book about a submarine. Today we know, that such a submarine cannot be build using the materials he described. It would have not been strong enough to resist the water pressure at the depths he quoted.

So what! Does it make his book less enjoyable? Is it of a lesser value today? And does it matter that Verne could not even swim? How dared he to write about underwater escapades!

I just finished AD,in 3 days, I couldn’t put it down. I also just witnessed the end of President Trumps time in office , and have no doubt that this is the way life has been for the immigrants seeking life here in the USA. This may not represent the entire country of Mexico, but I think it’s a realist read on what immigrants go through to get here. And even worse, what happens if they are detained, now that we all know the realities of his vicious immigration policies. If it is exaggerated at all, so what, it is representive of what an immigrants life is now.

I have lived among many Central Americans and know many Mexicans. I have travelled the whole length of the country by bus. I also have known a woman who has had similar experiences to Lydia. Middle class and who I accompanied to a asylum seeking court appearance because someone was searching for her to kill her. The evidence obtained from Central America was enough to cause the judge to grant her asylum. I also found that I grew to like many of the characters in the book. I was not judging nor do I judge Mexico. The story i read is only one part of how I view Mexico with its “sympatico” people, rich heritage, hard working people, personable caring friends, lively music, a language I have learned to speak, etc.

Almost every book has flaws, big, small…I liked the book. For me it was an interesting personal story of a mother, son and important influencers. It was not meant to learn about Mexican culture. We know how cartels can work. We learn about them every day!

It’s fiction, for cripe sake. I don’t read fiction in order to expand my knowledge, understanding or perspective of the material. If I wish to acquire knowledge of a particular subject, I don’t resort to fiction to do so. It’s a so called thriller. I found it long at times, elaborating on the same scenes. Maybe the breakdown of every meal they ingested was of interest to some, but I found it to be maybe more of accomplishing a word count for the author. All considered, I found the book to be marginally entertaining. I should acknowledge that I read it as a book club assignment. Normally I would avoid any book that Oprah is pontificating on.

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Book News & Features

Latinx critics speak out against 'american dirt'; jeanine cummins responds.

Rachel Martin

American Dirt

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Author Interviews

'american dirt' author jeanine cummins answers vocal critics.

There's a book you might have heard of by now. It's called American Dirt , and it's the much-hyped new novel from author Jeanine Cummins that was released this week.

It's the story of a Mexican woman named Lydia and her 8-year-old son Luca, who flee their home and undertake a harrowing journey to the U.S. border after gunmen from a local drug cartel kill most of their family. It's been hailed as "a Grapes of Wrath for our times." In fact, that quote is on the cover of the book. [Disclosure: Flatiron Books, publisher of American Dirt , is among NPR's financial supporters]

And that is one of the many problems with American Dirt , according to several critics. There have been tweet threads and essays , all arguing that the book deploys harmful stereotypes. Even a hashtag — My Latino Novel — has popped up on Twitter, where people are writing their own parodies. But there is so much more to say about race and identity in publishing, about who gets to tell what stories and which of those voices are elevated in the mainstream culture.

Los Angeles Times writer Esmeralda Bermudez has been one of the most vocal critics of American Dirt . "In 17 years of journalism, in interviewing thousands of immigrants, I've never come across anyone like American Dirt's main character," Bermudez says.

"She's this middle-class, bookstore-owning woman who left Mexico with a small fortune in her pocket, like she was going to go to France or something. With inheritance money. With an ATM to her mom's life savings. And why did she leave? Because she was flirting with a drug lord who's now trying to kill her. This is a wonderful, melodramatic telenovela, something I would love watching for cheap entertainment, like a narco-thriller on Netflix. But this should not be called by anyone 'the great immigrant novel, the story of our time, The Grapes of Wrath .' Why? How did we get to a point in our industry, in the book industry, in society, that this is the low standard that we have?"

Writer Myriam Gurba, another critic of the book , pointed out a particular inauthenticity: "There is a scene where the main character encounters an ice rink. And she's utterly shocked at the existence of this ice rink, as if she's unaware that winter sports are played in Mexico. And I was laughing," Gurba says. "I laughed out loud when I got to that section because I learned to ice skate in Mexico. I learned to ice skate at age 9 in Guadalajara."

Bermudez, like many others speaking out against the book, says that despite the author's intentions, it doesn't reflect the truth of the migrant experience. "My grandfather, my aunt, my uncle were killed in El Salvador at a time of death squads. Death squads sponsored by the U.S. I was separated from my mom, I didn't meet her until I was five because of all this violence. I wanted to see myself reflected in this book. It's painful that not only did I not see myself, but I found all these things that constantly make us feel small."

She says she understands that Americans who aren't migrants themselves or come from migrant families may walk away from this book with a completely different feeling. "This book has left a lot of white readers with this very fuzzy feeling, like, 'Oh my God' about immigrants. And my skin is crawling. My skin is crawling."

We recorded an interview with Cummins, the book's author, last week — an interview that never aired because the criticism of American Dirt started coming down hard, and the conversation about this book had to change. So we called Cummins back. She says she's tried to avoid the criticism, especially on Twitter. When I share some of what's being said, Cummins says, "I don't know how to respond to this. ... Not everyone has to love my book. I endeavored to be incredibly culturally sensitive, I did the work, I did five years of research. The whole intention in my heart when I wrote this book was to try to upend the stereotypes that I saw being very prevalent in our national dialogue. And I felt like there was room ... for us to examine the humanity of the people involved."

Cummins says she's aware of her own privilege, her cultural blind spots and the imbalances in the publishing industry. "And that's not a problem that I can fix, nor is it a problem that I'm responsible for," she says. "All I can do is write the book that I believe in. And I did that."

You can find the rest of my conversation with Cummins here.

This story was produced for radio by Lisa Weiner and Reena Advani, and adapted for the Web by Petra Mayer.

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Why Everyone’s Talking About American Dirt

The controversy about jeanine cummins’ novel encompasses appropriation, cries of silencing, and four separate new york times stories..

Why is literary Twitter piling on Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt , once one of the most highly anticipated books of the year? After an intense bidding war among nine houses that ended in a reported seven-figure deal, the novel landed on both the New York Times’ and LitHub’s 2020-in-reading lists. It’s in stores Tuesday, accompanied by praise from heavyweights like Stephen King, Sandra Cisneros, and Don Winslow—the last of whom compared the migrant drama novel to John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath . A film adaptation is already in the works by the same company that produced Clint Eastwood’s The Mule.

But an increasingly vocal contingent of Mexican and Mexican American writers has panned the novel as “ trauma porn ,” pointing out myriad inconsistencies and errors in Cummins’ descriptions of Mexico that a largely American, non-Spanish-speaking industry of agents, editors, and publicists seemed to not have been able to notice.

Over the long weekend, the slowly brewing clash spilled onto the pages of the New York Times books section. Here’s what’s going on.

American Dirt follows the journey of a mother and son fleeing Mexico for America after their entire family is murdered on the orders of a local cartel kingpin. Before the slaughter, Lydia Quixano Pérez is a bookseller in Acapulco, mother to Luca and wife to journalist Sebastián. It is Sebastián’s exposé on the kingpin, who also happens to be a frequent customer of Lydia’s bookstore, that serves as the linchpin for the violence that sets off the novel and Lydia’s journey through the desert to the border.

In her afterword Cummins describes a four-year writing process that included extensive travel and interviews in Mexico. Cummins writes of her desire to humanize “the faceless brown mass” that she believes is so many people’s perception of immigrants. “I wish someone slightly browner than me would write it,” she continues. “But then I thought, if you’re the person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge .” I’m sure you can see where this bridge is going.

The Backlash

At first glance, the criticism of American Dirt reads as the increasingly pro forma conversation about who’s allowed to tell whose story. On one side are Mexican and Mexican American writers asking why Cummins felt the need to tell this story, other than to individuate a “faceless brown mass” that she’s not a part of—simultaneously raising the question of who exactly sees that mass as faceless and whether it’s worth writing for them. On the other side is Cummins raising a familiar alarm on how conversations around cultural appropriation will eventually morph into censorship. In a profile in the Times touching on the controversy, she said, “I do think that the conversation about cultural appropriation is incredibly important, but I also think that there is a danger sometimes of going too far toward silencing people.”

The public debate began with a review of American Dirt by Myriam Gurba * published in Tropics of Meta, an academic blog that publishes essays on a broad range of topics. Gurba takes to task not only Cummins’ identity—she apparently identified as white as recently as four years ago, when she wrote in the New York Times that she wasn’t qualified to write about race—but also American Dirt ’s similarity to other books about Mexico that Cummins used for research, as well as the novel’s ignorance of the very people the book purports to represent. “That Lydia is so shocked by her own country’s day-to-day realities […] gives the impression that Lydia might not be … a credible Mexican,” Gurba writes. “In fact, she perceives her own country through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist.”

Gurba also dropped that she was originally assigned to review American Dirt by “an editor at a feminist magazine”—later revealed to be Ms. While her editor thought the review was “spectacular,” Gurba wrote, it was nonetheless killed because Gurba “lacked the fame to pen something so ‘negative.’ ”

Though Gurba’s review was published over a month ago, in the days before American Dirt hit the shelves it was shared again and again . Writers like Jose Antonio Vargas and Viet Thanh Nguyen publicly called for Ms. to account for why they decided to kill the review.

The New York Times

But the pan with the biggest reach came this weekend when Parul Sehgal wrote for the New York Times’ daily Books of the Times section that “this peculiar book flounders and fails.” Two days later, the Times Book Review published Lauren Groff’s conflicted review , which makes the case that the novel “was written with good intentions, and like all deeply felt books, it calls its imagined ghosts into the reader’s real flesh.”

What’s literary drama without the Gray Lady? The differences between Sehgal’s and Groff’s reviews were noted as soon as the latter published on Sunday. Soon after Groff’s review dropped, it was linked from the Book Review’s Twitter account with a line more complimentary than any that exists in the published review: “ ‘American Dirt’ is one of the most wrenching books I have read in the past few years, with the ferocity and political reach of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s novels.” Groff responded, “Please take this down and post my actual review.” (She added, “ Fucking nightmare .”) The tweet, according to Groff and, later, New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul , had mistakenly been pulled from an earlier draft of the review—one that perhaps started out more positive about American Dirt than it ended up. Groff seemed to agonize over the review in public, eventually tweeting, “I give up. Obviously I finished my review long before I knew of Parul’s—anyone who has gone through edits knows the editing timeline—but hers is better and smarter anyway. I wrestled like a beast with this review, the morals of my taking it on, my complicity in the white gaze.”

Once upon a time, books frequently received reviews from both the daily Times and the Book Review, but that’s much rarer now. These days it happens only to the most newsworthy or most highly anticipated books—which often happen to be their publishers’ seasonal lead titles, the ones that get the biggest publicity budgets. In addition to those reviews, the Times also published an excerpt for some reason. Oh, and the profile. All of which makes Cummins’ fears—stated in the New York Times!—about being “silenced” seem a bit silly. For the big-money book publicity machine to wield its influence on behalf of a novel about the Mexican immigrant experience written by a non-immigrant, non-Mexican author—when books by Mexican and Mexican American writers often struggle to see daylight—is another reminder of what the industry deems valuable. Cummins’ good intentions have largely been acknowledged, but as Rebecca Makkai wrote in LitHub last year —and linked to on Tuesday , “apropos of nothing”—“I [can’t] good-person myself into good writing.”

Still, the conversation seems to have reached its peak and is calming down. Let’s just hope Oprah doesn’t pick American Dirt for her book club or anything .

Correction, Jan. 21, 2020: This piece originally misspelled Myriam Gurba’s last name.

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The controversy over the new immigration novel American Dirt, explained

A non-Mexican author wrote a book about Mexican migrants. Critics are calling it trauma porn.

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The new novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, officially released on January 21, was anointed the biggest book of the season well before it came out.

It sold to Flatiron Books at auction for a reported seven-figure advance . Flatiron announced a first print run of 500,000 copies. (For most authors, a print run of 20,000 is pretty good .) It received glowing blurbs from luminaries like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Sandra Cisneros. Early trade reviews were rapturous . The New York Times had it reviewed twice — once in the daily paper, once in the weekly Book Review — in addition to interviewing the author and publishing an excerpt from the novel.

But as the publication date approached, the narrative around American Dirt has changed. One of those New York Times reviews was a pan , the other was mixed at best . Another critic revealed that she’d written a review panning the book, too, and the magazine that commissioned her review killed it.

All of these negative reviews centered on one major problem: American Dirt is a book about Mexican migrants, and author Jeanine Cummins has identified as white , calling her family mostly white “in every practical way” a few years ago. ( She has since begun to discuss a Puerto Rican grandmother .) Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it. In fact, she seemed to fetishize the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings.

So last week, when Oprah announced that American Dirt would be the next book discussed in her book club, the news was treated not as the crown jewel in the coronation of the novel of the season, but as a slightly awkward development for Oprah . Oprah ended up qualifying her choice , maintaining that she would keep the book in her club, but change her planned coverage of it to a series of conversations with those on “both sides” of the issue.

Oprah, lounging in a silk robe, sipping her morning coffee, copies of Groff's and Seghal's reviews of AMERICAN DIRT on the coffee table. She picks up her phone and thinks: I'll show these literary girls what chaos is — joshua gutterman tranen (@jdgtranen) January 21, 2020

Meanwhile, in the wake of the controversy, Flatiron has canceled Cummins’s book tour , citing threats to both Cummins and to booksellers. And some of American Dirt ’s critics say they have received threats, too.

The story of American Dirt has now become a story about cultural appropriation, and about why publishing as an industry chose this particular tale of Mexican migration to champion. And it revolves around a question that has become fundamental to the way we talk about storytelling today: Who is allowed to tell whose stories?

“I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”

American Dirt is a social issues thriller. It tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, fleeing their home in Acapulco, Mexico, for the US after the rest of their family is murdered by a drug cartel. Lydia is a bookstore owner who never thought of herself as having anything in common with the migrants she sees on the news, but after she comes up with the plan of disguising herself by posing as a migrant, she realizes that it won’t really be a disguise: It’s who she is now.

In her author’s note, Cummins explains that she wrote American Dirt in an attempt to remind readers — presumably white readers — that Mexican migrants are human beings. “At worst, we perceive them [migrants] as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep,” she writes. “We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.”

Cummins also says in the note that she recognizes that this story may not be hers to tell, while stressing that her husband is an immigrant and that he used to be undocumented. She does not include in the note the fact that her husband immigrated to the US from Ireland, an elision that some observers have taken to be strategic, as though Cummins wishes to give the impression that her husband is Latino and could have been in just as much danger of being held in a cage at the border as the people she is writing about.

“I worried that, as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it,” Cummins says. (It is worth noting at this juncture that plenty of people who are slightly browner than Cummins have in fact written about Mexican migration.) “But then, I thought, If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge ?” Cummins continues. And so she spent years working on this book, traveling on both sides of the border and interviewing the people she met there.

American Dirt is explicitly addressed to non-Mexican readers by a non-Mexican author, and it is framed as a story that will remind those readers that Mexican migrants are human beings. And for some readers, including some Latinx readers, Cummins was successful in her aims. In her blurb for the book, the legendary Mexican American author Sandra Cisneros declared herself a fan, writing, “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas . It’s the great world novel! This is the international story of our times. Masterful.”

But for other readers, American Dirt is a failure. And it fails specifically in achieving its ostensible goal: to appreciate its characters’ humanity.

“It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween”

The first true pan of American Dirt came out in December , on the academic blog Tropics of Meta. In it, the Chicana writer Myriam Gurba takes Cummins to task for “(1) appropriating genius works by people of color; (2) slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and (3) repackaging them for mass racially ‘colorblind’ consumption.”

Gurba describes American Dirt as “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf,” arguing, “ American Dirt fails to convey any Mexican sensibility. It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween.” Most especially, she critiques the way Cummins positions the US as a safe haven for migrants, a utopia waiting for them outside of the bloody crime zone of Mexico. “Mexicanas get raped in the USA too,” she writes. “You know better, you know how dangerous the United States of America is, and you still chose to frame this place as a sanctuary. It’s not.”

Moreover, Gurba notes that American Dirt has received the kind of institutional support and attention that books about Mexico from Chicano authors rarely do. “While we’re forced to contend with impostor syndrome,” she writes, “dilettantes who grab material, style, and even voice are lauded and rewarded.”

Gurba originally wrote her review for Ms. magazine, but it never appeared there. “I had reviewed for them before,” Gurba told Vox over email. But this time, “when they received my review, they rejected it, telling me I’m not famous enough to be so mean. They offered to pay me a kill fee but I told them to keep the money and use it to hire women of color with strong dissenting voices.”

Gurba says she’s had a mostly positive response to her review, “except for the death threats.” She maintains that American Dirt is a very bad book.

“ American Dirt is a metaphor for all that’s wrong in Big Lit,” she says: “big money pushing big turds into the hands of readers eager to gobble up pity porn.”

“I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book”

Gurba’s review established the counternarrative on American Dirt , but that narrative didn’t become the dominant read until January 17. That’s when the New York Times published a negative review by Parul Sehgal , one of the paper’s staff book critics.

“Allow me to take this one for the team,” Sehgal wrote. “The motives of the book may be unimpeachable, but novels must be judged on execution, not intention. This peculiar book flounders and fails.”

Sehgal, who is of Indian descent, says she believes in the author’s right to write about “the other,” which she argues fiction “necessarily, even rather beautifully” requires. But American Dirt , she says, fails because of the ways it seems to fetishize its characters’ otherness: “The book feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider,” she writes.

And, putting aside questions of identity and Cummins’s stated objective, Sehgal finds that American Dirt fails to make the argument that its characters are human beings. “What thin creations these characters are — and how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations,” she says. “The heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous.”

Two days after Sehgal’s review came out in the daily New York Times, the paper published another review from the novelist Lauren Groff in its weekly Book Review section . Groff, who is white, was less critical of American Dirt than Sehgal was, but her review was far from an unmitigated rave: It wrestles with a number of questions over whether Cummins had the right to write this book.

But you would not know as much from the Book Review’s Twitter account, which posted a link to Groff’s published review with a quote that appears nowhere within it. “‘American Dirt’ is one of the most wrenching books I have read in the past few years, with the ferocity and political reach of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s novels,” said the now-deleted tweet.

“Please take this down and post my actual review,” Groff responded .

According to Book Review editor Pamela Paul , the tweet used language from an early draft of Groff’s review and was an unintentional error. But for some observers, that tweet, combined with the deluge of coverage the New York Times was offering Cummins, made it appear that the paper had an agenda: Was it actively trying to make American Dirt a success?

The Times’s intentions aside, in her review, Groff treats American Dirt as a mostly successful commercial thriller with a polemic political agenda, as opposed to Sehgal, who treated it as a failed literary novel. (Arguably, Groff is being truer to the aims of American Dirt ’s genre than Sehgal was, but given that American Dirt is a book whose front cover contains a blurb calling it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times,” it’s hard to say that Sehgal’s expectations for literary prose were unmerited.) Groff praises the novel’s “very forceful and efficient drive” and its “propulsive” pacing, but she also finds herself “deeply ambivalent” about it.

“I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book” as a white person, she writes, and became even more sure as she learned that Cummins herself was white. Groff spends much of her review wrestling with her responsibility as a white critic of a novel addressed to white people by a white author about the stories of people of color, and ends without arriving at a satisfying answer. “Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism,” she concludes; “at the same time, weeks after finishing it, the novel remains alive in me.”

On Twitter, Groff has called her review “deeply inadequate,” and said she only took the job in the first place because she didn’t think the Times would ask anyone else who was willing to wrestle with the responsibility of criticism in the course of reviewing it. “Fucking nightmare,” she tweeted .

Fucking nightmare. — Lauren Groff (@legroff) January 19, 2020

In the wake of these reviews, the American Dirt controversy coalesced around two major questions. The first is an aesthetic question: Does this book fetishize and glory in the trauma of its characters in ways that objectify them, and is that objectification what always follows when people write about marginalized groups to which they do not belong?

The second is a structural question: Why did the publishing industry choose this particular book — about brown characters, written by a white woman for a white audience — to throw its institutional force behind?

“Writing requires you to enter into the lives of other people”

The aesthetic question is more complicated than it might initially appear. People sometimes flatten critiques like the one American Dirt is facing into a pat declaration that no one is allowed to write about groups of which they are not a member, which opponents can then declare to be nothing but rank censorship and an existential threat to fiction: “If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience,” Lionel Shriver declared in the New York Times in 2016 , “there is no fiction, but only memoir.”

But the most prominent voices in this debate have tended to say that it is entirely possible to write about a particular group without belonging to it. You just have to do it well — and part of doing it well involves treating your characters as human beings, and not luxuriating in and fetishizing their trauma.

In another New York Times essay in 2016 , Kaitlyn Greenidge described reading a scene written by an Asian American man that described the lynching of a black man. She strongly felt that this author had the right to write such a scene, she says, “because he wrote it well. Because he was a good writer, a thoughtful writer, and that scene had a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain.”

Brandon Taylor made a similar point at LitHub earlier in 2016 , arguing that successful writers have to be able to write with empathy. “Writing requires you to enter into the lives of other people, to imagine circumstances as varied, as mundane, as painful, as beautiful, and as alive as your own,” Taylor said. “It means graciously and generously allowing for the existence of other minds as bright as quiet as loud as sullen as vivacious as your own might be, or more so. It means seeing the humanity of your characters. If you’re having a difficult time accessing the lives of people who are unlike you, then your work is not yet done.”

Critics of American Dirt are making the case that Cummins has failed to do the work of empathy. They are arguing that she has the right to write from the point of view of Mexican characters, but that they have the right to critique her in turn, and that what their critiques reveal is that she does not see the humanity of her characters. They are arguing that instead, American Dirt has done the opposite of what Greenidge applauded that lynching scene for accomplishing. That the book has failed to suggest “a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain.”

It’s in the spirit of that reading — of American Dirt as a failure in empathy, as trauma porn — that Gurba noted on Twitter that an early book party that Flatiron Books created for Cummins featured barbed wire centerpieces.

pic.twitter.com/6W8suWpCUD — Myriam Chingona Gurba de Serrano (@lesbrains) January 22, 2020

Flatiron has issued an official apology for those centerpieces, saying, “We can now see how insensitive those and other decisions were, and we regret them.” But for critics of the novel, the central problem remains. Those barbed wire centerpieces are all about the aesthetic splendor of migrant trauma, about the idea of reveling in the thrill of the danger that actual human beings have to deal with every day, without ever worrying that you personally might be threatened. They’re a fairly good illustration of what the phrase “trauma porn” means.

“I only know one writer of color who got a six-figure advance and that was in the ’90s”

The institutional questions about American Dirt are more quantitative. They progress like this: There are plenty of authors of color writing smart, good stories about their experiences. And yet American Dirt , a novel written by a white woman for a white audience, is the book about people of color that landed the seven-figure advance and a publicity budget that could result in four articles in the New York Times. Why has publishing chosen to allocate its resources in this way?

Flatiron Books has defended its choice. “Whose stories get told and who can tell them are important questions,” said Amy Einhorn, Cummins’s acquiring editor and Flatiron’s founder, in a statement emailed to Vox. “We understand and respect that people are discussing this and that it can spark passionate conversations. In today’s turbulent times, it’s hopeful and important that books still have power. We are thrilled that some of the biggest names in Latinx literature are championing American Dirt .”

It is worth pointing out here that Einhorn, a well-respected industry vet, was also the acquiring editor of the 2009 novel The Help , a novel by a white woman about black women in the 1950s. The Help was a bestseller and a major success, but it was also the subject of a critique similar to the one American Dirt is experiencing now , with readers arguing that The Help gloried in fetishizing the pain of its subjects.

Meanwhile, authors of color say they rarely see publishers investing the kind of money and support in their books on the level that The Help and American Dirt received.

“I got sexually assaulted by a serial killer in 1996. I wrote a book about that . Most of the subjects in that book are Mexicans and Chicanx. I got paid $3,000 for my story,” Gurba says. “So yes, the publicity surrounding American Dirt is unfamiliar to say the least.”

“I’ve always had five-figure advances ( my fourth book comes out this spring ) and many of my friends have gotten four figures — and they are mostly writers of color,” said the novelist Porochista Khakpour in an email to Vox. “I only know one writer of color who got a six-figure advance and that was in the ’90s.”

Khakpour adds that the level of hyperbolic attention American Dirt has received, especially from the New York Times, is deeply unusual for publishing. “I only got a Sunday [New York Times Book Review] review for my first novel and that felt like a miracle,” she says. “Again, most writers of color I know are published by indies or academic presses, and it’s hard for them to get the attention of the Times. I write for the NYTBR and I can honestly say I’ve never seen this much attention given to a book — I find it embarrassing.”

Both Khakpour and Gurba argue that American Dirt was appealing to publishers because white people tend to be most comfortable reading about people of color as objects of suffering.

“Certain narratives that flirt with poverty porn make liberal white people feel good about their opinions,” Khakpour says. “They feel like they learn something, like by reading these accounts they are somehow participating in helping the world they usually feel so helpless about.”

Gurba says many white people expect to see her enact such narratives herself and become angry when she doesn’t. “Recently, a white woman got angry at me when she found out that I’m Mexican,” Gurba says. “She insisted that I didn’t look or act Mexican and that I had confused her. But she confused herself. She had a stereotype of what Mexicans are. I defied it. That made her uncomfortable. Now, apply that scenario to the literary equation [ American Dirt has] presented.”

The narratives Gurba and Khakpour suggest both assume that the decision-makers on American Dirt were white. And there is very good reason for that assumption: Publishing is an extremely white industry.

According to the trade magazine Publishers Weekly, white people made up 84 percent of publishing’s workforce in 2019 . Publishing is staffed almost entirely by white people — and in large part, that fact can be explained by publishing’s punishingly low entry-level salaries.

A job as an editorial assistant pays around $30,000, and it likely means living in New York City, where conservative estimates generally say you need an annual salary of about $40,000 before taxes to get by . But landing a position as an editorial assistant is generally a promotion: To get one, you usually have to spend a season or two working as an intern first, for low or no pay.

Such salaries mean that the kind of people who work in publishing tend to be the kind of people who can afford to work in publishing: those who are carrying little student debt and who can rely on their parents to supplement their salaries as necessary. And mostly, those people tend to be white.

As a result, publishing is predominantly staffed with well-meaning white people who, when looking for a book about the stories of people of color, can find themselves drawn toward one addressed specifically to white people — and who will lack the expertise to question that book’s treatment of its characters. Which means that as long as publishing continues to be overwhelmingly, monolithically white, it will continue to find itself mired in controversies like the one surrounding American Dirt .

Update: This story was originally published on January 22, 2020. It has been updated to include news of Cummins’s book tour cancellation, Oprah’s plan for discussing American Dirt as part of her book club, and Flatiron’s statement of apology for the barbed wire centerpieces.

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The “American Dirt” Controversy: Lessons for Writers on Getting Cultures Right

Author Jeanine Cummins has been attacked on social media for sensationalizing the Mexican migration with lurid violence and stereotypical characters in her book. Photo courtesy of Flatiron Books

The American Dirt Controversy: Lessons for Writers on Getting Cultures Right

A conversation with cuban-american author dariel suarez (grs’12), education director at creative writing center grubstreet.

Not many people have a more informed perspective on the controversy swirling around American Dirt , the wildly hyped best-selling novel about a Mexican mother and her son escaping to the United States, than Latino writer Dariel Suarez. 

American Dirt ’s author, Jeanine Cummins, identifies herself as white and Latina. She received a seven-figure advance for her book, which has raised questions about how the publishing industry chooses which books, and writers, to aggressively promote, how authors approach writing about marginalized people from other cultures, and how the story of immigration, one of the most politically charged issues in the United States today, gets told.

As education director at GrubStreet , a nonprofit writing center in Boston, Suarez (GRS’12), who has an MFA in creative writing, spends a lot of time thinking about these kinds of questions. 

Cummins has been attacked on social media for sensationalizing the Mexican migration with lurid violence and stereotypical characters. Her publisher, Flatiron, was criticized for promoting a soap opera-ish page turner as the immigration novel of our times—and throwing a book party with barbed-wire-festooned centerpieces—while overlooking talented Latinx authors who have written about the subject with greater nuance and complexity. Flatiron has since apologized for how it positioned and publicized the novel, and its parent company, Macmillan, has pledged to substantially increase its numbers of Latinx authors and staff.   

Suarez was recently awarded first prize at the International Latino Book Awards for Best Collection of Short Stories in English for A Kind of Solitude (Willow Springs Press, 2019). His first novel, about a Cuban family navigating government censorship, social media, and migration, is due out next year from Red Hen Press.

BU Today sat down with Suarez to talk about American Dirt and what he tells students who want to write about people who are different from them.

With Dariel Suarez

Bostonia: some people say that this is about cultural appropriation, that a white american woman shouldn’t have written a novel about the mexican migration. how do you feel about that.

Suarez: I have a fundamental problem with framing the conversation through the lens of how do people write in the call-out culture—are folks allowed to write about people who are different from them—because that’s just code for, “Can white people write about people who are not like them—who are not from the same race or culture—without getting criticism?” To me, that’s centering the conversation on whiteness. It’s complicated. It’s not just POC [people of color] calling people out on Twitter, which is one part of it, but it’s also POC having more of a voice, which I think is a good thing… Now you have to consider a larger, more diverse audience if you want to be a good writer. My perspective—and I think that of most critics and most readers—is that we aren’t saying you can’t write about a person who’s different from you, who’s from a different culture. That’s not what this is about.

Taking one for the team this week. Was curious about the season’s supposed big, breakout novel. If only books could be reviewed for their intention not execution.. https://t.co/0Ski959YHY — Parul Sehgal (@parul_sehgal) January 17, 2020

Bostonia: Are you talking about fiction?

Suarez: Yes, but also any type of writing when it gets into culture and the way that an audience reads it. The point that’s being made is that if you are going to write outside of your own culture, or from a position of privilege, that you do so thoughtfully, that you engage with people in those communities—that you have them read your work and give you feedback.  And that you also interrogate—why should you be the one telling the story? How am I doing it? Who is reading it and giving me feedback? Where are my blind spots? Where am I not doing enough of the cultural work? Those, to me, are legitimate questions that should be part of the artistic process.  I’m Cuban, I was born in Cuba. I grew up in Cuba until I was a teenager, when I came to the United States. In fiction and in my nonfiction and in my poetry, I’ve written about Cuba and about people and places that have nothing to do with me. I’ve written outside of my race. I’m light-skinned and I’ve written about black characters. And I’ve written about women. I always have people read the work and critique it from a craft perspective, but also to highlight anything in the content that seems problematic or not nuanced enough or unclear.  I’ve been called out by my wife on things in my novel—this chapter, this scene, it just reads as a little bit sexist, did you intend for the characters to be that way? That’s valuable criticism.

Bostonia: Have you made changes in your writing based on that feedback?

Suarez: Yes. I want to make sure the cultural details in my stories about Cuba are as true to life as I can make them, based on the people who are reading these stories, who may have even more experience than I did because I left the country when I was young.  I give the benefit of the doubt to writers that they have good intentions. I think they have the right to be curious and to explore and to write about people who are different from them. And, in fact, they are doing it. They’re getting seven figures for it. It’s funny how people talk about censorship. I come from a country where censorship is the real thing, and it’s nothing like what these people claim here.  If you’re getting seven figures for a book, if Oprah is picking your book [ American Dirt is Winfrey’s latest book club selection], if you’re getting a lot of attention, I don’t believe that’s censorship. Now, if you’re being criticized, that’s different. Some people can get personal, they can make threats—that’s crossing a line. There’s no place for that in any conversation. 

Suarez: But the bigger point is—there is a community of people telling you there’s something wrong with this book. And you should listen and say, “Let me engage, let me see where I failed because obviously it’s not resonating with the community that I’m writing about.” But that’s often not their [the writers’] reaction and I think that’s where people get frustrated.

Bostonia: What do you tell your students about writing about the so-called other?

Suarez: I tell my students you can write about anyone and any place you want. You should be ambitious in your work and write about what you don’t know as a way to learn, as a way to inhabit other people and to develop empathy. Then you should have people read the work and check you on your blind spots.  Your job is to make it nuanced, to not rely on stereotypes and not fall into the lazy pitfall of writing a character that you only define through two or three characteristics and put into a box, instead of saying, “I want to have a complex, interesting, layered human being who happens to be this way and these are the ways it manifests in the story.”  And also to not assume that folks identify themselves only through one lens. I think stereotypes happen when you write about a black character and everything in the story is defined through the lens of the fact that they’re black. That’s not how we  think about ourselves. I don’t think of myself as Cuban, Latino, every second of the day. I’m human, I’m a metalhead. I like heavy metal music. That’s a part of my life that’s important to me. So if I were to write about myself, that would be something that I would want to explore, maybe even more so at times than the fact that I’m Latino or Latinx. At GrubStreet we emphasize content, which encompasses context, alongside craft as part of the conversation. Any social, cultural, gender, racial stuff that might be part of the writing—we lean into that conversation. We believe inclusion and diversity are directly tied to artistic excellence—we don’t separate the two. The goal is the same: let’s be  better writers—and better people. 

You should write about what you don’t know as a way to learn, as a way to inhabit other people and to develop empathy. —Dariel Suarez

Suarez: It’s all complicated and it’s never going to be perfect. I think our approach, which is starting to come more to the forefront, is, hopefully, creating generations of writers who will be more aware of the cultural importance of their work and their audience. I think what happens to a lot of these writers: they grow up in a bubble, they study and get feedback and praise in a bubble, and then reality hits when the book comes out and people say, “Hey, you forgot about us, you didn’t take into account how we would feel about your book.”  This is not about censorship. Any writer is susceptible to a Twitter storm. Unfortunately, that’s the reality that we live in. It’s how you respond and how you engage with it and how you grow from it and how you improve your work that I think matters. And I think that’s also often not central to the conversation.

Bostonia: Have you read American Dirt ?

Suarez: I’ve read a few chapters, and I’ve read a few of the reviews that did a good job of delineating some of the issues. For anyone in that culture [Mexican], I can understand why it would feel problematic. Based on the chapters that I read, I felt like the use of Spanish was at times laughable. It felt badly done, artistically. And also some of the names and details felt like stereotypical telenovela, soap opera.  But the frustrating part to me is more than just the the artistic failure—it’s that in publishing they keep giving money and privilege to writers who are not within the culture. And then so many other writers who are writing about the same things in a more complex and nuanced way are not getting the money, the attention.  It’s very disheartening for writers to look at the way the publishing industry is run and then to see people get so up in arms when they get criticized. Work, art—it’s up for being socially and culturally criticized. That comes with the territory, especially with such a high-profile book.

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Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

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There are 15 comments on The “American Dirt” Controversy: Lessons for Writers on Getting Cultures Right

The more she is attacked, the more I feel sorry for Jeanine Cummins — who wrote American Dirt because she cared. People should read the book for themselves. I suspect many readers will be moved and inspired to read more books on this subject.

I suggest you read through the interview once more. The issue isn’t that Jeanine Cummins was the person to write her book, it’s how she did it. Personal attacks are not productive, everyone can agree on that. It is productive, however, to criticize writers with social and cultural power who write at the expense of others’ humanity. Sure, Jeanine Cummins may have written the novel because she cares. But the people of color criticizing her writing and the publishing industry also do so because they care, and they are the ones who are most affected by this controversy. Jeanine was paid a seven figure advance, let’s not forget about that.

Thanks, I realize that. I was referring to attacks in general. I still suggest that people read the book for themselves.

“But the people of color criticizing her writing and the publishing industry also do so because they care, and they are the ones who are most affected by this controversy. ”

We actually don’t know if they’re the ones most affected, or even affected at all. Just because one has a Hispanic surname does not mean that he was a refugee. It’s possible to grow up Hispanic in America and not care one little bit. I know that messes with your worldview, but it’s the truth. We really need to get past this obsession that people like you have with skin color. The vast majority of the rest of us look deeper. You don’t, and that’s fine, but I’m not going to let you present your worldview as the norm. It’s not. Dirt was a compelling story. It humanized migrants in a way precious little else has. There’s great value in that, even if it comes from whitey.

Great interview. Dariel Suarez is spot-on. I appreciate his (and Bostonia’s) reintroduction of sensible nuance to the conversation.

I listened to the audio book twice. I read the criticisms after. I have worked with workers from these countries for 25 years, know some of their stories; some who came here as teenagers I was fortunate to have traveled to one of these countries, as a guest; I was welcomed, stayed with family, and immersed in culture. Not, not among the wealthy and priviledged, regular people, like myself I admire them as good people, family people, and friends and appreciate the communities they have formed here to navigate the immigrant experience that awaited them here, and I will continue to support “them” There isn’t enough literature documenting the challenges to be faced on the journey, and the reasons that force these men and women to make the decision to “leave the land they love”…….Any book can be criticized; it would be unfortunate if the criticism of American Dirt dissuaded many not to read it. It may not be “perfect” as the criticism of the novel suggests, it was well done, peaked my interest, and I will recommend it to my reading family and friends; our grandparents were immigrants too. I will read Mr Suarez’ book about Cuba, which will interest me as well, when it becomes available.

Would have been nice if you had actually cited the books by other authors that were “more nuanced”.

You mean piqued your interest not peaked your interest … I am an immigrant as well. I believe that the book was written and the author was given an assignment and a lot of money to write of the Mexican refugee experience for political reasons. So for me I question the integrity of not only the author but the story.

I chose American Dirt as one of the books for my book club. I had no idea about the controversy surrounding it. This book was intense and a page turner. You want these characters to survive. You want them to be unharmed. You cry for them. We haven’t even reviewed the book formally and It has already had an impact on our members. There has been research and sharing of information about ways that we can all help. Some of us have discussed reading more titles regarding the migrant crisis that are not fictional. This was all accomplished by a Fictional novel. If a fictional novel can make us step back, feel with our hearts and want to take action in real life why can’t the author be applauded? Fiction doesn’t require complete accuracy. We’re not reading fiction the way we would read a journalist’s contribution. In fiction we are allowed to fill in gaps for ourselves. Jeanine Cummins may end up being more of a bridge than she ever knew she could be. She may be the bridge between the Latinx authors and the publishing companies. When we do review this book I will play the Oprah Book club American Dirt videos. I want to hear what all of these members have to say about how a fictional book with multiple humanitarian messages became all about publishing companies and the authors who feel scorned by them. I wonder if gratitude should be more appropriate. The authors have had National exposure, although I’m not sure if I would call it positive exposure. I found it interesting that, when it had been determined that the frustration and controversy lie in the publishing company’s hands and not Jeanine’s, one of the Latinx Authors still directly called her out on what she was doing to be a bridge. I believe Jeanine has already been a bridge: a bridge for her readers, a bridge for every class, a bridge for every heart, a bridge for every color, and yes a bridge for the Latinx authors who want to be published and probably wanted to be the ones who wrote a book that became a bridge like this one.

Please give an example of a book on this subject that is more nuanced , compelling or accurate.

Not Mexican, but for the universal migrant/ displaced female experience try Arturo Barea’s Two Women published in English about 1984 , I think.

Correction- Two Women was published in English in 1954!

Apologies: I grow old! Two Women is by Alberto Moravia – not Arturo Barea (tho’ he too is worth checking out)

Everyone is a critic! This is a work of fiction that touches on some of the problems and horrible violence we read about in Mexico, be it drug cartels, water thieves, avocado farms or other lawlessness. Daniel Suarez admits that he didn’t read the book. He only read a couple of chapters. I am enjoying the book. I am treating it as a work of fiction with some small educational value. I appreciate that the main character is intelligent, a college graduate with means. We are fed the story that migrants are poor unwashed that will demand that we provide for them. I wonder if Mr Suarez resents the 7 figure advance more than what he sees as inconsistencies in the accuracy of the actual Mexican experience. Relax people it’s good fiction. Does everything have to be a test?

If you want nonfiction accounts with heart and soul, read Luis Alberto Urrea’s “Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border,” “By the Lake of Sleeping Children,” and “The Devil’s Highway.” Luis grew up in Tijuana and San Diego; he’s bilingual, bi-national, and bicultural, and was a translator on the border for a while. I went to creative writing grad school with him for a year, and I can tell you that he’s a person of integrity who certainly has not received a million dollars to write any book. And he has a great sense of humor and humanity.

Check out his web page; he’s written and published novels and poetry, too, for decades.

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The truth about ‘American Dirt’ Once again journalists are choosing political tribalism over the facts

Migrants trying to cross into the US. Photo: Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images

Jesse Singal

February 17, 2020   8 mins.

Recently, I wrote an article for UnHerd lamenting what feels like the collapse of professional norms within my area of — broadly speaking — Left-of-centre journalism.

Using the controversy surrounding a group of Covington Catholic High School students filmed in front of the Lincoln Memorial last year as a prime example, I complained that staffers and contributors at mainstream progressive outlets increasingly seem to see themselves more as activists and cheerleaders whose job is to fall on the “right” side of a given controversy, rather than journalists whose job is to investigate that controversy fairly, with a critical eye.

Not two weeks later, I stumbled into a wonderfully specific example of how these dynamics work in action. It involves Huffington Post , a controversial novel, and imaginary Mexicans eating chicken dipped in barbecue sauce.

In the United States, the book publishing industry — or parts of it, at least — is swaying and buckling from certain seismic cultural forces. As America’s conversations on race and identity have gotten louder and more public, some in and around publishing have argued that the industry is unwelcoming to people who aren’t white, straight, cisgender, and so forth, and that this discrimination is apparent when you look at which books gets published, and by whom.

There’s more than a kernel of truth to this. Publishing is (and has long been) a redoubt of the privileged, and the editorial offices of major New York publishers tend to be staffed largely with graduates of top colleges. Publishing isn’t quite as lily-white as some claim it is — yes, it’s about 76% white , but that’s in a country that’s about 72% white , and half of all interns are non-white — but few insiders would argue that there aren’t certain significant issues to address in making it more accessible to a broader swath of the population (which, after all, often leads to better stories anyway).

If the core claims of those criticising publishing on identity grounds are reasonable, that doesn’t mean that individual campaigns targeting supposedly “problematic” books always have been. Far from it, in fact — in the last few years there has been a succession of fundamentally unfair online pileons targeting books, mostly in young adult publishing, that are deemed offensive and emblematic of publishing’s broader diversity issues.

As Kat Rosenfield and others have shown, these campaigns tend to be based on highly exaggerated, ripped-from-context misreadings of the books in question, often spread via social media. Sometimes, for example, the argument a racist character in a book about overcoming racism said something racist, and therefore the book is racist is presented unironically, by grown adults familiar with literary conventions, as evidence of wrongdoing on an author’s part.

In one incident I covered , members of the Twitterati decided a character in the fantasy universe of the then-upcoming novel Blood Heir was black (there was no real evidence to suggest this), decided an allusion to modern-day slave trafficking in Asia was actually about  American slavery, and decided that they therefore didn’t like the book’s handling of race and slavery.

They raised a sufficiently loud outcry that the imminent publication of the novel, authored by Amélie Wen Zhao, a Paris-born woman of Chinese ancestry who lives in the United States, was cancelled, though the book was later revised and released . In another instance, a black male author’s book about two foreign boys escaping Kosovo as it is engulfed in warfare was cancelled entirely based, again, on questionable claims.

These campaigns might now be spreading from young adult to general literature. Since late 2019, the biggest story in American publishing has been American Dirt , a novel written by Jeanine Cummins about a Mexican woman, Lydia, and her son, Luca, who are forced to flee their home in Acapulco to the United States after a drug cartel murders much of their family, including Lydia’s husband (Luca’s father), at a relative’s quinceañera barbecue.

While the book appears to be selling quite briskly — reaching  Number One on the New York Times’ fiction bestseller list (it now sits at number three) — it sparked a raging controversy that appears to have popped off after Oprah picked it for her very influential book club. Since then, an endless parade of articles and essays have lamented how deeply offensive and harmful American Dirt is, most of them focused on the fact that Cummins is neither Mexican nor a migrant but a white American-born woman who is a quarter Puerto-Rican.

American Dirt ’s critics insist, almost unanimously, that it isn’t Cummins’ race that is animating their anger, but rather her handling of the novel’s subject matter, combined with the fact that Latino authors, and authors from migrant backgrounds, rarely get seven-figure advances like Cummins’ (you will notice this hefty sum is mentioned quite frequently; the YA campaigns, too, tend to focus on authors who earned enviable advances).

Their campaign has been successful: according to a press release reported on by the LA Times , Macmillan, the parent company of Flatiron Books, which published American Dirt , met with a group of the book’s critics and stated that they would be “substantially increasing Latinx representation across Macmillan, including authors, titles, staff and its overall literary ecosystem” as well as to “regroup within 30 days with [the activist group] #DignidadLiteraria and other Latinx groups to assess progress.” Cummins’ book tour, meanwhile, was cancelled because of safety threats.

The problem, as I noted in my newsletter , is that many of the examples of the supposedly awful parts of American Dirt bemoaned by its critics are strained at best. In one widely circulated Medium essay , for example, the Mexican-American author and translator David Bowles made extremely basic errors about the book’s plot . For this misleading essay, he was rewarded with a New York Times column (which repeated some of his errors) and a chance to be one of the activists who met with Macmillan. In Jezebel , the writer Shannon Melero exhibited a similar lack of familiarity with the actual writing contained in the novel .

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But the article that is really sticking with me, for reasons that will become clear, ran in Huffington Post . It’s headlined “ American Dirt Isn’t Just Bad — Its Best Parts Are Cribbed From Latino Writers” and is written by David J. Schmidt, also an author and translator.

His very strange main argument is that Cummins’ erred, somehow, by including real-life places and events in her novel based on the work of Mexican non-fiction writers — non-fiction writers she explicitly thanks in the book’s Author’s Note, and in one case references in the text of the novel itself. It’s difficult to even suss out a genuine criticism here, given that novelists include real-world elements in their books all the time and, like Cummins, frequently thank the individuals and texts that help inform their world-building.

Schmidt’s piece also includes this sentence: “[Cummins] describes an imaginary country where people put sour cream on their street tacos, dress their chicken with BBQ sauce rather than mole, eat black licorice drops rather than mazapán, and fear the Bogeyman rather than El Coco. American Dirt is also riddled with linguistic gaffes, including a character thinking of her own mother as abuela (grandma).”

This is a useful example of how, during a public outrage, so much smoke is generated by bad-faith actors that the casual passerby will assume there must be a roaring conflagration generating it, that whoever is being targeted did something truly wrong.

Because it’s remarkable, once you’ve read the book, how little there is here, and how conveniently devoid of proper context these examples are. American Dirt contains a single mention of licorice drops — Lydia recalls that her recently-murdered mother enjoyed that particular candy.

I’m not saying Mexicans are huge fans of black liquorice, but is it impossible a middle-class Mexican woman living in a major city lousy with American tourists (Acapulco) could enjoy, and have access to, that particular candy? And Lydia thinks of her own mother as abuela in the same way an English-speaking person might think of her mother as grandma, because that’s how she’s known to her children.

There are two mentions of “bogeymen” in the book, and they both come in the narrator’s voice, not out of the mouths of a Mexican character — “Because these are the modern bogeymen of urban Mexico,” Cummins writes of cartel assassins early on. Later she writes, in relation to a terrible incident in the United States, that “The vigilantes wanted to stoke community fear and incite outrage by inventing a group of murderous migrant bogeymen”. There’s no scene in which Mexicans “fear the bogeyman” himself.

As for the sour cream, it is not served with a street taco. Rather, Lydia and Luca buy it in the food court of “a vast shopping mall with a Sephora and a Panda Express and even an ice rink” in Mexico City — one which also includes a Crepe Factory. The idea of an establishment like this, plopped in the middle of a cosmopolitan megacity, having American-style sour cream, is a lot less ridiculous than the image Schmidt is attempting to conjure.

It’s Luca who eats the tacos with sour cream; he’s the English-speaking son of middle-class Mexican parents and grew up, again, in an American-tourist-heavy city, so in context, the idea of him enjoying sour cream isn’t ridiculous, either. The point, here and elsewhere among some of Cummins’ least honest critics, is to make her look as ignorant as possible, even if that requires massaging the facts a bit.

But when it comes to the chicken dressed with barbecue sauce, the facts aren’t even massaged, but rather snapped in half like a wishbone: there is no scene, anywhere in American Dirt , in which a single Mexican slathers a single piece of barbecued chicken in barbecue sauce. It simply doesn’t happen.

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I think Schmidt confused himself. Right at the beginning of the novel, when Luca and Lydia’s extended family is murdered (I’d say “spoiler alert” but the book’s literal first sentence is about a bullet whizzing past Luca’s head as the massacre commences), Cummins writes: “The clatter of gunfire outside continues, joined by an odor of charcoal and burning meat. Papi is grilling carne asada out there and Luca’s favorite chicken drumsticks. He likes them only a tiny bit blackened, the crispy tang of the skins.”

Then, a bit later, as Lydia, in shock, surveys the scene of the massacre with investigators: “In the shade of the backyard, there’s the sweet odor of lime and sticky charred sauce, and Lydia knows she will never eat barbecue again.”

Nowhere here, in the only mention of a sweet and/or sticky sauce that could possibly apply to Schmidt’s claim, is there any evidence of a Mexican person eating chicken with barbecue sauce on it. These passages prove neither that the sauce in question is barbecue sauce (all we know is that it’s sticky, at least when charred) or that it was intended for chicken (“Papi” is grilling both carne asada, meaning beef, and Luca’s “favourite chicken”).

I emailed Schmidt to ask him about this, and he replied that “The sauce is described as sticky, sweet sauce that is put on barbequed chicken.” But nowhere does Cummins say the sauce is for the chicken, and even if she did, that wouldn’t make it American-style barbecue sauce, which is the basis of Schmidt’s accusation of cultural illiteracy.

I found out who the story’s two editors were and emailed one of them about this, suggesting she correct this. She forwarded my request to the other, a fairly well-known progressive journalist — one whose name I recognised and respect. “The debate about the sauce seems like you’re projecting your own guess on the text rather using the context clues,” she wrote, declining to correct the story.

I was very surprised by this, and I found myself dwelling on it ever since, somewhat fixated. This barbecue chicken issue is a little thing, sure, but it’s a big little thing. That is, whatever disagreements may exist between journalists, we all agree — or at least publicly claim to agree — that, at root, our job is to print stuff that’s true.

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Other critiques of American Dirt may be unfair, but they’re fundamentally subjective. This one isn’t: Huffington Post is telling its readers that a controversial book was written by someone so ignorant of Mexican culture she thought Mexicans dress their barbecue chicken the exact same way Americans do, even though this simply doesn’t happen anywhere in the book. If this doesn’t warrant a correction, what does? If we can’t agree on the norm “Don’t print stuff that plainly isn’t true,” what norms can we agree on? This is the lowest-hanging journalistic fruit imaginable.

I don’t think Cummins or Flatiron Books are blameless here. Setting aside linguistic critiques of the book’s Spanish I’m ill-equipped to evaluate, they did make two very silly unforced errors that warrant criticism: an Author’s Note in which Cummins refers to her previously “undocumented” husband without noting he is Irish (which, yes, is still a stressful situation to be in, but is miles away from being an undocumented Mexican migrant), and a book party at which barbed wire was used, rather insensitively, as a “cute” decorating motif.

But these issues don’t bring us anywhere near the apocalyptic storyline that has settled in as fact — that this is a disastrously ignorant, under-researched, harmful book — in some quarters. Watching the outrage bloom has been deeply depressing, and has only solidified my worries about rightside norms in journalism.

It’s one thing for resentful critics, eager to jump on outrage-bandwagons, to publish bad-faith misreadings of books on random blogs or their Facebook walls. There will always be unfair critics. But when major outlets like the New York Times and Huffington Post are helping to amplify this nonsense, without even checking whether the critics have closely read the books they claim to be furious about? When they won’t even correct textbook errors which hinge on objective facts about the contents of the books in question? We have a problem.

Jesse Singal  is the author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills and cohost of Blocked and Reported. His Substack is Singal-Minded .

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This sort of reactionary dogma is increasingly the norm among liberals on social media and, sadly, in publications that consider themselves serious sources of information and analysis. Perhaps you could provide an up close review of the way New York Magazine dismissed Andrew Sullivan for failing to adhere to the new Orwellian orthodoxy.

I was thrown out of Liberty Union Party in VT, (Google it),by an old, trusted friend, Marina Brown who is trans. Underhanded methods were used to eliminate me. There is a question of legality, as Liberty Union is chartered. Marina Brown called me a “transphobic bigot” for condemning the drugging of children and the erosion of Women’s Sports. And for taking part in online discussions about the issues. The same excessive elements in the Trans movement are also involved in the violent Antifa looting and the “cancel culture” that uses blatant falsehood to advance its agendas.

Myriam Gurba took down ‘American Dirt.’ It might be the least interesting thing about her

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By Myriam Gurba Avid Reader Press: 352 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Of all the weather phenomena, fog may be the richest in literary associations. To be in a fog is to have senses dimmed, to feel as if you’re inhabiting a space between worlds. For early 20th century Spanish Modernist Miguel de Unamuno — who wrote an entire experimental narrative titled “ Fog ” (sometimes translated as “Mist”) — it referred to the minutiae that obscure existence; in Ken Kesey ‘s 1962 novel, “ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ,” it is the haze of hallucination.

For Myriam Gurba, fog is a condition that disorients and ensnares.

Born and raised in Santa Maria , the author grew up with the cotton-colored marine layer that regularly envelops the California coast. In the title essay of her forthcoming nonfiction collection, “ Creep: Accusations and Confessions ,” out next week, Gurba explains that she has long been captivated by fog. “The white floated like miles of strange breath exiled from its source,” she writes. “It embodied gothic verbs. It oozed. Crept. Snaked. Snuck. Its moisture tickled and licked, droplets settling on eyebrows, eyelashes, bangs and sage. The inscrutability of the white’s shape and size teased. Intangible, the soup was potentially infinite.”

This physical fog is accompanied by a psychological version: a relationship with an attentive suitor she calls “Q” who soon becomes abusive, holding her captive through violence and its constant threat.

“Creep,” like much of Gurba’s work, is less linear narrative than a constellation of topics that orbit one another: control, violence, isolation and defiance, with detours into Shakespeare, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and the nature of terroir . Binding these themes together are the suspenseful conventions of horror writing. (I found myself holding my breath in parts.)

And, of course, there is fog: soft yet sinister, intangible yet deadly. Fog, she tells me when we meet, is a “great metaphor” for domestic violence. “How can you be killed by love?”

You may have heard of Gurba, but it’s unlikely that you know her; her reputation comes swathed in some fog of its own. Gurba, 46, has published five books and too many short stories and essays to count. But the L.A.-based writer is perhaps most familiar for her famous takedown of Jeanine Cummins’ border thriller, “ American Dirt ,” in the online journal Tropics of Meta in 2019.

That searing piece, arguing that the novel “aspires to be Día de los Muertos, but it, instead, embodies Halloween,” ignited furor and then reckoning over representation and systemic racism in the book industry. In response, Gurba and fellow writers David Bowles and Roberto Lovato launched the group #DignidadLiteraria to advocate for a greater Latinx presence in publishing — an effort that led to a not-inconsequential meeting with honchos at Macmillan, the conglomerate behind “American Dirt.”

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020 put those efforts into hibernation. (Though the uprisings that followed the murder of George Floyd three months later made the discussions of representation feel prescient.) Yet the controversy had the effect of typecasting Gurba as the impudent indie writer willing to torch the publishing industry to make a point about diversity. (Never mind that “American Dirt” went on to be a massive bestseller.)

That controversy spilled into another, when in February 2020 Gurba was put on administrative leave from her job as a high school teacher in Long Beach after she spoke out in support of students who had alleged abuse against a fellow teacher. She also raised public allegations against Q, the man she writes about in “Creep,” who worked for the district.

Seated at a sidewalk cafe on a bright L.A. morning, Gurba declines to discuss her departure from the Long Beach Unified School District. (She is no longer employed there.) Nor does she want to reveal any specifics about where she currently lives or works. But when it comes to her writing, she is far more open and revealing.

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Jeanine Cummins’ novel about a migrant family, “American Dirt,” hasn’t been published yet but has already stirred a debate: Who should tell what stories?

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To this day, she remains surprised by the reaction to her piece about Cummins. “It was shocking to me that that essay was as widely read as it was,” she says. “Certain critics and pundits and public intellectuals ascribed an extraordinary amount of power to me, alleging that I had permanently upset the publishing industry in these horrific, anti-white ways” — the final clause delivered with evident irony.

But she is ready to move on. “One of the things that really bugs me about some folks and their response to my work is that they will hyper-focus on that essay,” she says, “and completely ignore all of the work I do around gender-based violence.”

And, frankly, Gurba’s other work is more compelling.

“Creep” marks the follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2017 memoir, “ Mean ,” the intertwining tale of a sexual assault she survived at the age of 19 combined with the story of another woman, raped by the same man, who did not live to tell the tale.

“Mean” was part ghost story, part queer Chicana coming-of-age memoir. (Prior to her relationship with Q, Gurba was married to a woman for 16 years.) The book was also about narrative itself, challenging the ways women are expected to write about themselves and about sensitive subjects like rape. Rich with black humor, “Mean” never betrayed a lick of sentimentality. “I want to be a likable female narrator,” she wrote in that book. “But I also enjoy being mean.”

Poet and essayist Raquel Gutiérrez , author of the collection “ Brown Neon ,” says she sees Gurba in the orbit of feminists such as Virginie Despentes and Inga Muscio (the latter also hails from Santa Maria) — writers who address female sexuality and abuse in blunt ways. “It’s very punk rock,” she says of Gurba. “ No tiene pelos en la lengua .” This is Spanish for: She does not mince words.

In person, Gurba does little to dispel her reputation for fearlessness. She says she has been scolded for using humor to address rape, the implication being that it’s disrespectful. “To that I always answer: I think rape is more disrespectful.”

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She also comes off as sharp and considered — preoccupied, for example, by the oral traditions of her family, some of whom hailed from rural Indigenous communities around Guadalajara. “There is so much involved in the breath and the tone and the inflection that I think can be translated to the page, but it takes a lot of effort,” she explains. “For me storytelling is inextricable with orality. ... I read all of my work aloud until I get a rhythm, I think about that almost as a musical composition.”

The new collection is consistent with Gurba’s other writing in style and voice, but it is a very different work.

Where “Mean” was taut, “Creep” is longer and shaggier: a collection of 11 essays — some previously published — that explore a range of themes, many revolving around misogyny and violence. Included in the mix is the essay about “American Dirt.”

But the most absorbing pieces are those in which Gurba turns her unblinking gaze to life’s cruelties, weaving together disparate threads that somehow hold in the end.

In “Tell,” observations about the feral games children play — like tossing Barbies out of windows to their “death” — evolve into a rumination on how these games function as rehearsals for facing mortality as an adult. Gurba cites occasions when such games have turned literal. In a chilling incident from 1951, Carlos Salinas de Gortari , the future Mexican president, then only 3, had a hand in killing a housekeeper while playing war games with his brother. (The boys were fooling around with a loaded rifle their father had left in a closet.) Games about war, like war itself, can lead to death — no rehearsal needed.

Gurba has been scolded for using humor to address rape, the implication being that it’s disrespectful. “To that I always answer: I think rape is more disrespectful.”

Essays in “Creep” bounce between the power dynamics of practical jokes and sexual assault; between Franz Kafka ‘s “The Metamorphosis” and the way Mexicans have historically been treated at the U.S. border. Many of the pieces, like “Mean” before it, also hopscotch through time — something Gurba attributes in part to close readings of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo ‘s “ Pedro Páramo ,” the 1955 novel that helped kick off the Latin American literary boom of the 20th century.

In that masterful story, a man journeys to a village of the dead. “‘Pedro Páramo’ really scoffs at time,” says Gurba. “[It] is such a a challenging book because of the relationship to time, because life and death are happening simultaneously. I wanted to mirror that seeming lack of structure in my work as an homage to him.”

Rulfo materializes at the heart of one of the more pleasurable stories in “Creep,” an essay that revolves around Gurba’s larger-than-life (and quite sexist) maternal grandfather, Ricardo Serrano Ríos, a Guadalajara publicist who had been a friend of Rulfo’s in school. Serrano spent his life alleging that he’d given Rulfo a manuscript of his poetry that was never returned — and that Rulfo had pillaged it for ideas.

“The other way Juan had supposedly ripped off Abuelito was by selling him an incomplete set of encyclopedias for two hundred pesos,” writes Gurba. “He still carried a grudge about those missing volumes.”

Gurba says that as a child she didn’t realize that the Rulfo of her grandfather’s rants was one of the most famous figures in Latin American letters. “I just knew him as the friend my grandfather would not shut up about,” she says with a laugh. “I wanted to hear ghost stories, not Rulfo stories. And the irony is that I had this one degree of separation from the greatest ghost story writer in all of literature!”

From her bag, she produces a dogeared copy of “Pedro Páramo” published by Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica (think the Mexican version of Penguin Classics ). The mustard-colored cover features an expressionistic painting of a canine. On the inside cover, Serrano Ríos has dedicated the book to his daughter — Gurba’s mom, Beatriz: “Beautiful daughter: this is one of the most important novels in the Spanish language.”

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The most disconcerting and enthralling essay in “Creep” is the final one, which delves into her three-year-long relationship with the abusive Q. To describe it in too much detail is to dilute its power, but the abbreviated version of the story is that as Gurba was writing and publishing “Mean,” and being hailed for its narrative innovations, she was also enduring terrifying brutality at home.

On the verge of another potential turning point for her reputation, the author says she now finds herself in a much better place. “There are conditions under which I’m living that are very good,” she says, “that I did not think were achievable.”

“It is difficult to know when one has exited the fog,” Gurba writes in the final pages of the book. “There are no sign-posts and one exits gradually. The noncolor is dense, then thin, and then, if one is very fortunate, not at all.”

The fog, at least for now, is gone.

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Carolina A. Miranda is a former Los Angeles Times columnist who focused on art and design, with regular forays into other areas of culture, including performance, books and digital life.

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That “American Dirt” essay

Feb 2, 2020

Before I post, let me explain. My editor had agreed to let me substitute another review for the one (on “AD”) originally assigned. But then “AD” became news and I gather his bosses asked why the Globe hadn’t covered it, and so I was asked to write about it. Yes, I had not wanted to give the book more oxygen, but I do think it is useful to let people in on the process of reviewing. For example, I don’t think people realize how many books get no attention at all. I wasn’t looking to “cancel” AD – it was already huge. I just had nothing new to add to the discussion and, with review space so limited, asked if I could give that attention to a book I liked more and that would not have otherwise gotten a writeup in the Globe. Anyway, this ran in Friday’s Boston Globe . (Sorry about the lines – I was trying to remove all the ads, etc.)

I wanted to review ‘American Dirt.’ Then I didn’t. Here’s why. 

By Clea Simon Globe Correspondent,Updated January 30, 2020, 10:01 a.m. 33

When I was first asked to review Jeanine Cummins’s “American Dirt” for the Globe, I was thrilled. With advance blurbs comparing it to “The Grapes of Wrath,” I knew it was going to be a big book, and I wanted to be part of that conversation. And the bang-up opening — the mass murder that sets a mother and her son on their journey north — had me eager to read more.

But once that initial excitement had worn off, I read with growing distaste. The writing is often awkward — the son “breathes into his body” — and many characters seem one-dimensional, the descriptions overblown and nonspecific. For example, the Honduran teen Soledad, a fellow traveler, is “so beautiful she seems almost to glow … A living miracle of splendor. It’s a real problem.” Of course it is, because of course Soledad had been forced into sexual slavery. As her “life deteriorated into a series of lurid traumas,” we learn that her beauty and virtue were her downfall. Degradation followed degradation, at the hands of her captor, who “let one of his homeboys pay him to be alone with her for an hour.” All of which she endured to protect her younger sister “afraid, but still intact.” 

As I read, it became clear. For Cummins’s purpose, this 15-year-old and her sister existed to be raped — an example of the violence women flee. That might serve a teaching function, but it also sends the message that our being can be defined by a criminal act perpetrated against us. You don’t have to read Chanel Miller’s “Know My Name” to understand how demeaning that is. As someone who has been assaulted — and who has gone on to enjoy life — it filled me with disgust. I knew then that if I had been reading this book for personal pleasure, I would have put it down at that point.

Right about then, someone forwarded me a profane but impassioned  essay  by Latinx author Myriam Gurba calling out Cummins’s presumption and racism as “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf.” (I try not to read other reviews until I’ve drafted mine, but this piece caught my eye. Warning: It contains bi-lingual profanity.)

I’m of European descent, and I confess that some of the subtleties pointed out in Gurba’s essay concerning Cummins’s personal qualifications to write a story like “Dirt” had eluded me. But what I read made sense — and made me read more carefully. More to the point, it fit with how I felt about those sisters. All of which brought home on a visceral level how this book might affect someone of Central American heritage or whose family had come to the United States seeking refuge more recently than mine.

This was a book that was already getting a ton of attention. At that point, I realized I didn’t want to add to that, especially when there are so many books that don’t get mentions at all.

The Globe, for instance, receives roughly 750 to 1,000 books each month for review. Of these, maybe 12 or 13 get full reviews monthly, a total that jumps to about 16 or 17 averaged annually, counting in seasonal roundups and lists. This is not an aberration: Laurie Hertzel, president of the National Book Critics Circle (to which I belong), reports that about 1,000 traditionally published books arrive each month at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she serves as senior books editor. Although seasonal roundups augment the approximately eight titles per week that get reviewed, she figures that still rounds out to about 50 discrete critiques a month. “That’s a very tiny percentage,” she says, “and our books section is quite robust.”

Granted, any review I wrote of “American Dirt” was going to be negative. It didn’t  matter . With critical attention so hard to come by, the truism about “any publicity is good publicity” has extra weight. I know this well from personal experience. Years ago, a book I wrote was savaged on Salon.com. My Amazon sales rank soared.

There were still arguments to be made for coverage.  Oprah , for example, has basically taken the tack that at least the book gets people talking about the issues. But my review wasn’t needed for that. Plenty of others, including people who had experience with asylum and immigration, were already starting to weigh in. In addition, there’s a counter-argument to be made that any such discussion sparked by “American Dirt,” with its stereotypes and lopsided perspective, would be shallow, assuaging guilt but not prompting the hard questions we need to address.

Again, for me, the gut check was the portrayal of those sisters. Could Soledad’s persecution raise a discussion about sexual trauma? Yes, as a topic. And the conclusions such a conversation would support? That rape is widespread among vulnerable populations — but also that it defines whomever it touches. That second half wouldn’t be a message I’d want promulgated, and there are better ways of raising the first, and more essential, point. Surely, this is true for discussions of the border and immigration as well.

I was lucky in that my editor and I had already discussed another book before deciding to go ahead with “American Dirt.” That book, “ Remembrance ,” a debut novel, had gotten promising pre-publication reviews in trade journals like  Publishers Weekly . Also, its author, Rita Woods, is a Black woman, which meant her work was  even less likely to get review attention  than other new books.

And so I asked if I could review “ Remembrance ” instead and be excused from writing about “American Dirt.”

Which I was, until now.

Clea Simon’s most recent novel is “ An Incantation of Cats .” She can be reached at   www.cleasimon.com

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American Dirt Essays

Don’t Tell America the Babysitter’s Dead

For decades, sitting was both a job and a rite of passage. Now it feels more like a symbol of a bygone American era.

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Babysitting used to be both a job and a rite of passage. For countless American teens, and especially teen girls, it was a tentative step toward adulthood—responsibility, but with guardrails. Perhaps you didn’t cook dinner, but you did heat some leftovers for the kids. Maybe you arrived to find them already tucked in, and you read them a story, turned out the lights, and watched TV until the car turned into the drive. You knew whom to call if anything serious came up. Paula Fass, a historian of childhood at UC Berkeley, told me that she started sitting around 1960, when she was 12 or 13. By the time she’d arrive, she remembers, the parents had put their kids to bed and stocked the fridge for her to raid. They recognized that she was grown-up enough to be an extra eye in the home—but childlike enough to go looking for snacks.

Sitting was a “quintessentially American experience,” Yasemin Besen-Cassino, a Montclair State University sociologist and the author of The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap , told me. For decades, working a part-time job was common for teens in the U.S.—perhaps a reflection of the cultural emphasis on hard work, discipline, and financial independence. Even tweens would babysit. And something about that position, teetering between dependence and independence, got lodged in our cultural imagination. Starting in the mid-20th century, the young sitter became an emblem of American girlhood—both a classic coming-of-age character and a locus of anxieties about girls’ growing autonomy. Just how mature are these teens? How much control should they have? And what kind of adults are they on the cusp of turning into? Those concerns preoccupied people not only in real life but also in a plethora of books, shows, and movies.

Today, the teen babysitter as we knew her, in pop culture and in reality, has all but disappeared. People seem to worry less about adolescents and more for them, and for their future prospects. As Fass put it, “Teenagers don’t seem very grown-up these days.” There’s not much reason to fear or exalt babysitters anymore—because our society no longer trusts teens to babysit much at all.

Read: Teen brains are perfectly capable

The 1920s were boom times for leisure. New technologies made chores easier, freeing up couples’ time, and growing wages gave people more disposable income. Meanwhile, restaurants and movie theaters proliferated, and car ownership exploded. Parents were going out at night—and more mothers were working during the day, too. At the same time, traditional child-care providers were becoming less available, Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, wrote in her book Babysitter: An American History ; grandparents, for instance, were enjoying social lives of their own. Working-class families, Fass told me, would still have been likely to enlist older siblings to watch the young ones. But middle-class parents could also afford to pay a few bucks to the kid down the block, who—as companies were marketing products, more and more, to youths —now had a reason to want pocket money. The teen babysitter was born.

From the beginning, the role was viewed with suspicion. Granting a young person unmonitored control over your children and your house may naturally have been a little worrisome—but beyond that, the sitter took on brewing cultural anxieties. Given that she was working outside her own home—and earning her own pay—she represented teen girls’ growing autonomy, according to Forman-Brunell . She was also associated with women’s liberation. After all, parents needed her partly because moms were starting not only to work but also to enjoy free time on the town. (Before the ’20s, Fass told me, “that kind of leisure had not been common to married women.”)

Those domestic worries came through in pop-culture depictions of the sitter. In the midst of the 1960s sexual revolution, she was often portrayed as a temptress, seducing fathers when mom was away; in the ’70s, she started showing up in horror movies, trapped with a killer in the house and kids to protect—perhaps a way, Forman-Brunell suggests, to see her punished for her self-sufficiency or for the irresponsible behavior audiences seemed to imagine. None of that was likely helping sitters’ reputation, but parents still needed them. That’s when The Baby-Sitters Club , the ’80s book series about a group of tweens running a sitting business—and solving mysteries in their spare time—came to the PR rescue. The novels exemplified what Forman-Brunell calls the “supersitter” trend, portraying fun but well-behaved, competent girls: role models for kids, and also a comfort for nervous parents. Teens’ trustworthiness was a tug-of-war.

But that cultural battle has quieted. There’s little point in it now, perhaps, because actual teens may not be babysitting so much anymore. The field is hard to track precisely, because it’s so informal by definition, but sources told me that many parents today are looking for professionalized child care, or at least older and more experienced caregivers. Teens, meanwhile, are given few opportunities for responsibility—especially with the kind of training wheels that babysitting used to entail.

Read: Why adolescence feels so intense

The archetypal sitter lived just a few doors down. She was the daughter of your friends; she was the girl you’d been watching grow up for years. But Americans today tend to be less well acquainted with neighbors than they used to be, and they trust other people less in general . If you’re not familiar with the high-schooler on your block, you might not feel comfortable placing your children in her questionably capable hands. Even more than that: You might never connect in the first place.

Even if parents do know potential young sitters nearby, they may still hesitate to rely on them. In the past few decades, as “intensive parenting” has become a child-rearing ideal across classes, grown-ups have broadly begun to see kids as fragile and in need of constant oversight . Tweens or younger teens might not seem like comforting sources of protection—they might seem like children in need of watching themselves. As Fass pointed out, it didn’t used to be unusual for 12-year-olds to babysit. Now more than two-thirds of American parents think kids should be 12 or older before they’re even left home alone. Several states have guidelines issuing a similar age limit; in Illinois, kids legally can’t be left unattended until age 14.

The intensive-parenting approach isn’t just about physical safety; it’s also about ensuring kids’ future financial security, using every spare moment to “enrich” them with skills. Besen-Cassino found in her reporting that this was very much part of parents’ calculus when it came to their children’s care. Many families don’t want their kids wasting time sitting in front of the TV or even just playing, she told me; they want them learning, say, math or piano or another language. And if kids are spending time in scheduled activities led by adults, they don’t need a sitter.

The same trend means teens themselves are also likely to be preoccupied—too busy with SAT prep or Model UN to be babysitting. Indeed, teen-labor participation has been dropping for decades, driven in part by adolescents turning instead to academic pursuits and internships. (High-schooler employment rates rose slightly after 2020—perhaps partly because employers, strapped while emerging from pandemic lockdown, were more willing to accommodate teens’ hectic schedules—but remain lower than they were in the latter half of the 20th century .) Part-time employment used to be a milestone in many kids’ transition to adulthood. But today, the period between childhood and adulthood seems to be longer than ever—psychologists call it “extended adolescence.” Americans are getting married, having kids, and buying houses at older ages, and spending longer on education and career exploration beforehand. So teens don’t just seem unfit for babysitting; babysitting might also seem unfit for teens. It’s not the kind of thing you think to put on a résumé.

Of course, not every teen has the privilege of doing an unpaid internship rather than making money; not every family can afford to fill their kids’ time with tutoring or extracurriculars. But intensive parenting isn’t limited to the superrich; it was initially described as a middle-class phenomenon , and more recently it’s spread , at least as an aspiration, across classes. So while less wealthy families are particularly likely to rely on unpaid child care from relatives or friends, many other parents are scrambling to give their kids a leg up with activities—or, if they’re really rich, leaning also on au pairs or boarding schools. It’s unclear who exactly the clientele for the humble babysitter really is anymore.

The result is that babysitting today feels more like a symbol of a bygone American era than a normal part of how teens come of age. The glut of babysitting pop-culture content has thinned significantly; even the TV reboot of The Baby-Sitters Club , which was such a massive hit as a book series, was canceled in 2022 after two seasons. The creator, Rachel Shukert, told Vulture that she believes that was partly because Netflix marketed it to girls rather than to grown-ups: “A show like this has tremendous nostalgic potential,” she said. “But if you’re 35 and you loved the books … Netflix is not going to show The Baby-Sitters Club to you.” It doesn’t sound like it hit teens particularly hard, perhaps because the experience of babysitting isn’t relatable to them.

Or maybe it just didn’t hit a cultural nerve because our fears are evolving. The Baby-Sitters Club was a blueprint for girls becoming women in a time when people were anxious about them maturing the right way. But most of the main characters are 12 or 13 when the series begins; Mallory, initially one of the club’s charges, starts babysitting herself at 11. It might no longer seem like a coming-of-age narrative because people may be less likely to see 11-to-13-year-olds as coming of age at all—just as kids.

Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?

Teen babysitters still exist , but they’re facing a different field than they once might have—more structured and formal. A 2020 study found that sitters tended to prepare carefully for their role, taking safety courses and planning a slate of activities in advance—and parents were comforted by those displays of seriousness. When Besen-Cassino spoke with sitters for her research, she learned that they had used their free time not just to get CPR training or lifeguard certifications or driving lessons but also to take classes so they could offer to help kids learn math or music or sports. They advertised themselves, she told me, as “not just a babysitter but someone who can change the life of that child.”

Especially given that babysitting has long been undervalued and underpaid, it seems unfair that teen girls should have to make all that extra effort just to get their foot in the door. And yet, caregiving is serious work; the fact that parents are taking it seriously is warranted. For so long, it’s been treated as something girls and women do naturally, not as labor that requires skills and deserves fair compensation. If we acknowledge that babysitting is more than just a starter job, maybe it makes sense for adults to take it on.

But young people do need some opportunities for growth. Rebecca Raby, a professor of child and youth studies at Brock University, in Canada, told me that first jobs can be extremely formative, even empowering experiences. She’s found that many young babysitters have a sense of pride in their craft and their earning ability. In the liminal space of early teenhood—a time of feeling awkward, misunderstood, and largely powerless—having a job can grant you dignity. And to be a role model for a younger kid might be nothing short of profound.

Ideally, society could acknowledge the gravity of caregiving but also support the teens who want to do it—and some people are working toward just that. Margaret House, a coordinator for Oregon State University’s community-partnership program, runs a babysitting-training program through the youth-leadership organization 4-H. She teaches teens about child development but also how to impress wary parents: the dos and don’ts of being in someone else’s home, different parenting styles, how to talk about yourself in interviews. They discuss how this work can lead to a real career—working in a day-care center, teaching preschool, researching early childhood—and how they might include babysitting on a résumé. Still, she doesn’t forget that this work is about creating trust in communities. Sure, it takes a village to raise a child, she told me, but “there is no village.” So grown-ups have to build it themselves.

House does sometimes have trouble connecting her sitters to parents. Recently, she tried to do a meet and greet at the local library, and she remembers that only a couple of adults showed up. But she doesn’t doubt that there’s an audience out there. She reminds the teens to tell parents about any extra talents they have, yes, but she boosts them up regardless: “Parents might want someone who’s older and going to be able to teach them multiple languages or whatever.” But just by being present and attentive, they’re offering a valuable service. “So don’t shortchange yourself,” she tells them.

Families still need help caring for their kids. Teens still need money, and chances to practice responsibility. And neighbors could stand to trust one another more—to start building their village. That won’t look just like it did in 1950, but that’s for the best. Perhaps we’ll find a way to finally treat adolescents as just what they are: not children and not adults, not scary and not superhuman. Just young people who, with a bit of support, can be capable of a great deal.

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Columbia University in the City of New York

Miriam and ira d. wallach art gallery.

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Moscow: City, Spectacle, Capital of Photography

April 30–june 21, 2003.

Moscow: City, Spectacle, Capital of Photography , an exhibition of 20th-century photographs of Moscow, opens at Columbia University's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 and remains on display through Saturday, June 21, 2003.

Moscow has been a powerful magnet for many Russian photographers of the 20th century. Moscow: City, Spectacle, Capital of Photography presents the work of 31 photographers, whose images have defined the visual experience of Moscow from the 1920s to the present. Diverse in form and strategy, the 90 photographs chosen for the exhibition trace the history of Russian documentary photography and offer insight into individual practices. From Aleksandr Rodchenko's constructivist visions and Evgenii Khaldei's humanist landscapes to Igor Moukhin's scenes of urban spectacle and alienation in the works of Russia's key 20th-century photographers, Moscow ventures beyond the expected image as a site of famous landmarks, architectural treasures and dramatic lifestyles.

Early 20th-century photographers Boris Ignatovich and Arkadii Shaikhet saw themselves in the vanguard of an emerging mass-media culture, defining with their cameras the visual experience of Soviet modernity. For nearly 70 years, Soviet photography was assigned the duty of maintaining the ideological rigidity of the Soviet State. Yet, as examples of the work of Iakov Khalip, Anatolii Egorov, Mikhail Savin, and Mark Markov-Grinberg show, Soviet photographic practices were much more complex than has been previously acknowledged. The works of these photographers remain intensely compelling to a modernist eye.

Contemporary Russian photographers, such as Lev Melikhov, Valerii Stigneev and Sergei Leontiev, engage with the legacy of the Soviet documentary photography. But for them the documentary is a complex and multivalent genre, which incorporates subjectivity, ambiguity and reflexivity and comments on social and cultural issues without losing sight of the position from which that commentary is made. In the recent photographs by Vladimir Kupriyanov, Igor Moukhin, Anna Gorunova and Pakito Infante, the "real" space of Moscow is replaced by an imaginary and optical spaces of virtuality.

The works in the exhibition are on loan from Moscow's Cultural Center Dom, and many are being shown outside Russia for the first time. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Wallach Art Gallery is publishing an illustrated catalogue with a scholarly essay by the exhibition curator, Nadia Michoustina, a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University's Department of Slavic Languages. The essay presents a nuanced history of Russian photography of the 20th century, and contributes to an interpretation of extraordinary images.

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Moscow-City: 7 surprising facts about the Russian capital’s business center

1. Guinness World Record in highlining

The record was set in 2019 by a team of seven athletes from Russia, Germany, France and Canada. They did it on September 8, on which the ‘Moscow-City Day’ is celebrated. The cord was stretched at the height of 350 m between the ‘OKO’ (“Eye”) and ‘Neva Towers’ skyscrapers. The distance between them is 245 m. The first of the athletes to cross was Friede Kuhne from Germany. The athletes didn't just walk, but also performed some daredevil tricks. Their record is 103 meters higher than the previous one set in Mexico City in December 2016.

2. Domination of Europe's top-10 highest skyscrapers

7 out of 10 Europe’s highest skyscrapers are located in Moscow-City. Earlier, the  ‘Federation Tower’ complex’s ‘Vostok’ (“East”) skyscraper was the considered the tallest in Europe.

Left to right: the lower of the ‘Neva Towers’ (296 m), Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt (300 m), Gorod Stolits (“City of Capitals”) Moscow tower (302 m), Eurasia tower (309 m), The Shard’ skyscraper in London (310 m), Mercury City Tower (339 m), Neva Towers (345 m).

However, in 2018, the construction of the 462 meter tall ‘Lakhta Center’ in Saint-Petersburg was completed, pushing ‘Vostok’ (374 m) into 2nd place. The 3rd place is taken by OKO’s southern tower (354 m).

3. The unrealized ‘Rossiya’ tower

If all the building plans of Moscow-City were realized, the ‘Lakhta Center’ in St. Petersburg wouldn't have a chance to be Europe's highest skyscraper. Boris Tkhor, the architect who designed the concept of Moscow-City, had planned for the ‘Rossiya’ tower to be the tallest. In his project, it was a 600 meter tall golden cylindrical skyscraper ending with a spire that was inspired by traditional Russian bell towers. Then, the project was reinvented by famous British architect Sir Norman Foster. He had designed ‘Rossiya’ as a pyramid ending with a spire. The skyscraper itself would have been 612 meters tall, and the height including the spire would have reached 744,5 meters (for comparison, the ‘Burj Khalifa’ in Dubai, UAE, would have been just 83,5 meters taller). Unfortunately, the investors faced a lot of economic problems, due to the 2008 financial crisis, so the ‘Rossiya’ skyscraper was never built. A shopping mall and the ‘Neva Towers’ complex was constructed at its place in 2019.

4. Changed appearance of ‘Federation Tower’

In its first project, the ‘Federation Tower’ was designed to resemble a ship with a mast and two sails. The mast was to be represented by a tall glass spire with passages between the towers. It was planned to make a high-speed lift in it. The top of the spire was going to be turned into an observation deck. But the ship lost its mast in the middle of its construction. Experts at the Moscow-city Museum based in the ‘Imperia’ (“Empire”) tower say, that the construction of the spire was stopped, firstly, due to fire safety reasons and secondly, because it posed a threat to helicopter flights – the flickering glass of the spire could potentially blind the pilots. So, the half-built construction was disassembled. However, an observation deck was opened in the ‘Vostok’ tower.

5. Open windows of ‘Federation Tower’

We all know that the windows of the upper floors in different buildings don’t usually open. Experts say that it’s not actually for people’s safety. Falling from a big height is likely to be fatal in any building. The actual reason is the ventilation system. In a skyscraper, it’s managed with a mechanical system, and the building has its own climate. But in the ‘Zapad’ (“West”) tower of the ‘Federation Tower’ complex, the windows can open. The 62nd and last floor of the tower are taken up by a restaurant called ‘Sixty’. There, the windows are equipped with a special hydraulic system. They open for a short period of time accompanied by classical music, so the guests can take breathtaking photos of Moscow.

6. Broken glass units of ‘Federation Tower’

The guests of the ‘Sixty’ restaurant at the top of the ‘Zapad’ tower can be surprised to see cracked glass window panes. It is particularly strange, if we take into consideration the special type of this glass. It is extremely solid and can’t be broken once installed. For example, during experiments people threw all sorts of heavy items at the windows, but the glass wouldn’t break. The broken glass units of ‘Zapad’ were already damaged during shipment . As each of them is curved in its own way to make the tower’s curvature smooth, making a new set of window panes and bringing them to Russia was deemed too expensive . Moreover, the investors had financial problems (again, due to the 2008 financial crisis), so the ‘Vostok’ tower even stood unfinished for several years. Eventually, the cracked window panes were installed in their place.

7. The highest restaurant in Europe

‘Birds’, another restaurant in Moscow-City, is remarkable for its location. It was opened at the end of 2019 on the 84th floor of the ‘OKO’ complex’s southern tower. Guests at the restaurant can enjoy an amazing panoramic view at a height of 336 meters. On January 28, the experts of ‘Kniga Recordov Rossii’ (“Russian Records Book”) declared ‘Birds’ the highest restaurant in Europe, a step toward an application for a Guinness World Record.

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Moscow, like other international urban areas , is decentralizing, despite considerable barriers. The expansion will lead to even more decentralization, which is likely to lead to less time "stuck in traffic" and more comfortable lifestyles. Let's hope that Russia's urban development policies, along with its plans to restore population growth, will lead to higher household incomes and much improved economic performance.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “ War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life ”

Note 1: The 23 ward (ku) area of Tokyo is the geography of the former city of Tokyo, which was abolished in the 1940s. There is considerable confusion about the geography of Tokyo. For example, the 23 ward area is a part of the prefecture of Tokyo, which is also called the Tokyo Metropolis, which has led some analysts to think of it as the Tokyo metropolitan area (labor market area). In fact, the Tokyo metropolitan area, variously defined, includes, at a minimum the prefectures of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama with some municipalities in Gunma, Ibaraki and Tochigi. The metropolitan area contains nearly three times the population of the "Tokyo Metropolis."

Note 2: The expansion area (556 square miles or 1,440 square kilometers) has a current population of 250,000.

Note 3: Includes all residents in suburban districts with at least part of their population in the urban area.

Note 4: Urban area data not yet available.

Photo: St. Basil's Cathedral (all photos by author)

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Road in city area.

The roads and ways of the city areas are very clumsy and many accidents are happening due to the short road. But you need to maintain the driving properly otherwise you may face accident. So now the government decided to expand the road which may put the positive effect on automobile sector. I think it is a helpful service for the society people. If you have a BMW car and you have faced any problem then better to repair it at BMW Repair Spring, TX for the best service.

Transit & transportation

Transit and transportation services are quite impressive in most of the urban cities; therefore people were getting better benefits from suitable transportation service. Urban cities like Moscow, Washington, New York and Tokyo; we have found high margin of transportation system that helps to build a better communication network in these cities. I hope through the help of modern transportation system we are able to bring revolutionary change in automobile industries; in this above article we have also found the same concepts to develop transportation system. Mercedes repair in Torrance

Moscow is bursting Noblesse

Moscow is bursting Noblesse at the seams. The core city covers more than 420 square miles (1,090 kilometers), and has a population of approximately 11.5 million people. With 27,300 residents per square mile (10,500 per square kilometer), Moscow is one percent more dense than the bleach anime watch city of New York, though Moscow covers 30 percent more land. The 23 ward area of Tokyo (see Note) is at least a third more dense, though Moscow's land area is at least half again as large as Tokyo. All three core areas rely

Belgravia Villas is a new

Belgravia Villas is a new and upcoming cluster housing located in the Ang Mo Kio area, nested right in the Ang Mo Kio landed area. It is within a short drive to Little India, Orchard and city area. With expected completion in mid 2016, it comprises of 118 units in total with 100 units of terrace and 18 units of Semi-D. belgravia villas

Russians seeing the light while Western elites are bickering?

What an extremely interesting analysis - well done, Wendell.

It is also extremely interesting that the Russian leadership is reasonably pragmatic about urban form, in contrast to the "planners" of the post-rational West.

An acquaintance recently sent me an article from "The New Yorker", re Moscow's traffic problems.

The article "abstract" is HERE (but access to the full article requires subscription)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gessen

One classic quote worth taking from it, is: "People will endure all manner of humiliation to keep driving".

I do find it odd that the "New Yorker" article author says nothing at all about the rail transit system Moscow had, on which everyone was obliged to travel, under Communism. It can't surely have vaporised into thin air?

Moscow is a classic illustration of just how outmoded rails are, and how important "automobility" is, when the auto supplants rails so rapidly than even when everybody did travel on rails up to a certain date, and the road network dates to that era, when nobody was allowed to own a car; an article written just 2 decades later does not even mention the rail transit system, other than to criticise the mayor for "failing to invest in a transit system".......!!!!!!!!

This is also a give-away of "The New Yorker's" inability to shake off the modern PC ideology on rails vs cars.

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Travel and Tourism Industry — The History of Moscow City

The History of Moscow City

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Published: Feb 12, 2019

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Guest Essay

It’s Not You: Dating Apps Are Getting Worse

By Magdalene J. Taylor

Ms. Taylor is a writer covering sex and culture.

“The golden age of dating apps is over,” a friend told me at a bar on Super Bowl Sunday. As we waited for our drinks, she and another friend swiped through Bumble and Hinge, hunting for new faces and likes. Across the bar were two young men: phones out, apps open, clearly doing the exact same thing. Never did the duos meet.

What’s lamentable here isn’t only that dating apps have become the de facto medium through which single people meet. Since 2019, three in 10 U.S. adults have reported using them, with that figure rising to roughly six in 10 for Americans under 50 who have never been married. Not only are people not meeting partners in bars or any of the once normal in-person venues — they’re barely meeting them on the apps, either.

Maybe most of us just aren’t as hot as we used to be. Maybe it’s time our inflated egos got knocked down a notch. Maybe the market of people still willing to put themselves out there in an attempt to date has gotten smaller. Or maybe the apps have functionally, intentionally gotten worse, as have our romantic prospects. The more they fail to help us form relationships, the more we’re forced to keep swiping — and paying.

The internet, where so many of us spend so much of our time, has not been spared from the decline in quality that seems to plague so much of consumer life. This phenomenon was described by the writer Cory Doctorow in a November 2022 blog post and is sometimes called “platform decay”: Tech platforms like Amazon, Reddit and X have declined in quality as they’ve expanded. These sites initially hooked consumers by being almost too good to be true, attempting to become essential one-stop shops within their respective spaces while often charging nothing, thanks to low interest rates and free-flowing venture capital funding . Now that we’re all locked in and that capital has dried up, those initial hooks have been walked back — and there’s nowhere else to go.

This is precisely what is happening with dating apps now, too, with much more urgent consequences. What’s worsening isn’t just the technological experience of online dating but also our ability to form meaningful, lasting connections offline.

The collapse of dating apps’ usability can be blamed on the paid subscription model and the near-monopoly these apps have over the dating world. While dozens of sites exist, most 20-something daters use the big three: Tinder, Hinge and Bumble. (Older people often gravitate toward Match.com or eHarmony.) All three sites offer a “premium” version users must pay for — according to a study conducted by Morgan Stanley , around a quarter of people on dating apps use these services, averaging out at under $20 a month. The purpose, many believe, is to keep them as paid users for as long as possible. Even if we hate it, even if it’s a cycle of diminishing returns, there is no real alternative.

In the early heyday of Tinder, the only limits on whom you could potentially match with were location, gender and age preferences. You might not have gotten a like back from someone you perceived to be out of your league, but at least you had the chance to swipe right. Today, however, many apps have pooled the people you’d most like to match with into a separate category (such as Hinge’s “Standouts” section), often only accessible to those who pay for premium features. And even if you do decide to sign up for them, many people find the idea of someone paying to match with them to be off-putting anyway.

“If I don’t pay, I don’t date,” a friend in his 30s told me. He spends around $50 a month on premium dating app subscriptions and digital “roses” to grab the attention of potential matches. He’s gone on 65 dates over the last year, he said. None have stuck, so he keeps paying. “Back in the day, I never would have imagined paying for OKCupid,” he said.

Yet shares (Bumble’s stock price has fallen from about $75 to about $11 since its I.P.O.) and user growth have fallen , so the apps have more aggressively rolled out new premium models. In September 2023, Tinder released a $500 per month plan. But the economics of dating apps may not add up .

On Valentine’s Day this year, Match Group — which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OKCupid and many other dating apps — was sued in a proposed class action lawsuit asserting that the company gamifies its platforms “to transform users into gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards that Match makes elusive on purpose.” This is in contrast to one of the group’s ad slogans that promotes Hinge as “designed to be deleted.”

People are reporting similar complaints across the apps — even when they aren’t taking the companies to court. Pew Research shows that over the last several years, the percentage of dating app users across demographics who feel dissatisfied with the apps has risen . Just under half of all users report feeling somewhat to very negative about online dating, with the highest rates coming from women and those who don’t pay for premium features. Notably, there is a gender divide: Women feel overwhelmed by messages, while men are underwhelmed by the lack thereof.

With seemingly increasing frequency, people are going to sites like TikTok , Reddit and X to complain about what they perceive to be a dwindling group of eligible people to meet on apps. Commonly, complaints are targeted toward these monthly premium fees, in contrast to the original free experience. Dating has always cost money, but there’s something uniquely galling about the way apps now function. Not only does it feel like the apps are the only way to meet someone, just getting in the door can also comes with a surcharge.

Perhaps dating apps once seemed too good to be true because they were. We never should have been exposed to what the apps originally provided: the sense that the dating pool is some unlimited, ever-increasing-in-quality well of people. Even if the apps are not systematically getting worse but rather you’ve just spent the last few years as a five thinking you should be paired with eights, the apps have nonetheless fundamentally skewed the dating world and our perception of it. We’ve distorted our understanding of how we’d organically pair up — and forgotten how to actually meet people in the process.

Our romantic lives are not products. They should not be subjected to monthly subscription fees, whether we’re the ones paying or we’re the ones people are paying for. Algorithmic torture may be happening everywhere, but the consequences of feeling like we are technologically restricted from finding the right partner are much heavier than, say, being duped into buying the wrong direct-to-consumer mattress. Dating apps treat people like commodities, and encourage us to treat others the same. We are not online shopping. We are looking for people we may potentially spend our lives with.

There is, however, some push toward a return to the real that could save us from this pattern. New in-person dating meet-up opportunities and the return of speed dating events suggests app fatigue is spreading. Maybe we’ll start meeting at bars again — rather than simply swiping through the apps while holding a drink.

Have you ditched dating apps for a new way to meet people, or are you still swiping left?

Opinion wants to hear your story.

Magdalene J. Taylor (@ magdajtaylor ) is a writer covering sex and culture. She writes the newsletter “ Many Such Cases .”

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