America's 'dirt-y' secret: Latinos are disappearing
SAN DIEGO -- You do this job long enough, and eventually you see it all. Like this: A bunch of Latino writers are upset that they're not being treated like "Dirt."
Of course, I speak about what the Latino literati has been referring to cryptically -- and often angrily -- as "the book."
The book is "American Dirt," and it's a novel, which is to say that the admittedly riveting story it tells -- about a Mexican woman and her son who leave their comfortable life in Acapulco and head for the U.S.-Mexico border as they flee drug cartels -- never happened.
How fitting then that this make-believe story would be written by a make-believe Mexican.
New York City-based Jeanine Cummins was born in Spain, but only because her Navy father was stationed there. She has lived her entire life in the United States, where she has identified as "white" and studied English in college.
Cummins does have a Puerto Rican grandmother. But she doesn't appear to have spent much time over the years identifying as Puerto Rican. Instead, she seems to have connected with her Irish heritage, writing two novels about Irish history. She also wrote a memoir.
But it was her fourth book -- which she says took her seven years to research and write -- that turned her into one of the most envied, and despised, authors in America.
One day, you're appearing on national television next to Oprah Winfrey, who is gushing praise for your book. The next, you're being blasted as an opportunistic culture appropriator, and your publicity tour is being canceled amid concerns about your safety.
One day, you're writing prose that traffics in racial stereotypes and shows a revealing obsession with whether your characters have brown skin or blue eyes. The next, you're the supposed victim of an unfair censorship and intimidation campaign from the "cancel" culture.
One day, you're trying to get mileage from the fact that your husband was an undocumented immigrant (oops, from Ireland), the next you're admitting that maybe it would have been better if this story had been told by an actual Latino/a.
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