Home » Entertainment » ‘American Dirt’, the controversial book recommended by Oprah Winfrey and censored by the Latino community for its account of Mexican migration

‘American Dirt’, the controversial book recommended by Oprah Winfrey and censored by the Latino community for its account of Mexican migration

The volume has unleashed criticism of an industry that is accused of wanting to profit from the experience of those it discriminates against.

The recommendation of the American television diva Oprah Winfrey to his reading club to read the novel ‘American Dirt’ has raised a gigantic wave of criticism by the Latino community, which includes the voices of both literary critics and writers

‘American Dirt’, written by Jeanine Cummis, is an editorial novelty that has enjoyed a big promotion in 2019, selling it as the work to read in this newly started 2020. But the maximum projection of this work has occurred with its emergence in the Winfrey reading club, who through social networks said: “Like many of us, I have I have read newspaper articles and I have seen television news and I have seen films about the plight of families seeking a better life, but this story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant. “

East fiction volume tells the story of the owner of a Mexican bookstore that loses part of her family at the hands of a drug cartel, embarking on a flight from Acapulco to the US in the company of his eight year old son.

But the work, praised by critics, has proved more than controversial. Both authors and critics of Hispanic descent have raised their voices against it, denouncing that so much publicity has been given to a book written by an author who does not know first-hand the drama of migration, and that the same means are not dedicated to promoting others works of Latin American authors.

This is what Esmeralda Bermúdez has expressed, whose family left El Salvador fleeing violence. “What I do see: a book industry that is out of touch – which rarely supports immigrants to tell our own stories-, anxious to earn money from our suffering with a cheap and stereotypical emotion, “has criticized on her Twitter account this journalist from the Los Angeles Times, who has spent 17 years devoting herself to covering the stories of migrants in the US.

Other critics, such as David Schmidt, lo have qualified like a poor imitation and a misunderstanding about what Mexico is, and has said that it can only “pray that this book does not go down in history as ‘the great novel of migrants'”.

Schmidt thinks the novel is “ridiculously inaccurate”, which only represents “fanciful imaginations of its monolingual American author” and that “promote the cause of misinformation and prejudice”. Thus, censorship from the way of writing the names of the main protagonists (with old spellings or imprecise translations), to the use of “more stereotyped cultural fetishes” or the representation of Mexico as “a one-dimensional nation”.

Cultural appropriation

In a note included in the book, Cummins herself argues that she would have liked the work to be written by “someone slightly more brown” (‘slightly browner than me’), but then he thought “that if she was the person who could be a bridge, why not be a bridge?”

In this sense, the controversy centers on the fact that there are many other literary works on the phenomenon of migration written by Hispanics that they know first hand the problem. This is the case of Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, author of ‘Lost Children Archive’, volume recommended by Barack Obama himself.

Luiselli, about ‘American Dirt’, commented On Twitter, Oprah program producers asked him if he could recommend writers of Hispanic descent. “But then they asked me if I could give them the contact of any of the ‘illegal persons’ with whom I had worked to speak with them. The conversation ended there, “said the writer in reference to the use of the controversial word ‘illegal’.

Draal banalization

Complaints about the trivial treatment of the drama suffered by thousands of families who are forced to leave their countries have also been abundant, and not only in relation to the content of the work, but also to its promotion.

The image of a ‘American Dirt’ promotion party where guests had dinner with concrete blocks with barbed wire as a centerpiece, in reference to the border with Mexico, it has also gone viral in the networks during the last days.

Precisely, the image has been disseminated by Myriam Gurba, writer, podcaster and artist of Mexican origin, who has also written one of the critics more devastating about the controversial book, which he has titled ‘Pendeja, you’re not Steinbeck’. In it, he explains that a women’s magazine refused to publish the criticism he had requested about ‘American Dirt’ after checking how negative it was. “The toxic heteroromanticism it gives an arc to the mud and because the white stain stains his prose, Cummins positions the United States of America as a magnetic sanctuary, a beacon towards which the chronology of history sounds “, he maintains in a text in which he says that the protagonist of the plot” perceives his own country through the eyes of an American tourist who grabs pearls. “

Migrants and race in favor of marketing

Also, people like the writer Leah Rachel von Essen, have denounced that the editors of Cummins have used the propaganda and marketing resources of his book “to give the impression that Cummins had direct personal access to the experience,” when it was publicized that he was married to an immigrant that at the beginning he did not have his documentation in order, omitting, intentionally, according to von Essen, that he was a citizen Irish, whose migratory experience is radically different from what is intended to be reflected in the novel.

Another repeated comment is the sudden ‘latinization’ of Cummins. There have been many who have rescued statements of this author from just four years ago in which it was defined as white. Now, following the promotion of his new work, he has begun to call yourself latin, because one of his four grandparents came from Puerto Rico. In fact, this is how you can read today in her Twitter biography, in which she defines herself as Puerto Rican.

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