So I think a lot of my friends have been following the controversy with American Dirt. Beyond the brilliant trashing by @lesbrains , the low quality of the book itself and the obvious racial politics, a few points need to be underscore (thread)
first, trash full of nasty stereotypes about Mexico is all over the place. Just watch recent films like Rambo, Peppermint, Sicario, and The Mule, the last two of them praised by critics, as example. So in this sense American Dirt is an unremarkable product of US culture.
What is really astonishing is the enormous investment in this: an bidding war leading to an obscene advance that no Latinx writer would ever dream in getting, very respected writers (including Chicanx writers) positively blurbing the book, an Oprah endorsement, etc.
This, in a literary system where Mexican American and Chicanx writers are thrown into a homogeneizing category of "ethnic fiction" and in a translation ecology where literature from Mexico was ignored for years prior to Luisell's rise.
The key point here is that Americans, even educated Americans, are astonishingly ignorant about Mexico, the country, Mexicans in both sides of the border, immigration and even basic Mexican culture and history (some educated people for instance know nothing about the War of 1847)
The racial, cultural and social diversity of Mexico, its class tensions, its regional diversity is always flattened not only by racism and xenophobia on the right, but often also, by the imposition on us of a racialization that makes our nationality to be thought as a race.
And this is the crux of the American Dirt phenomenon, beyond the indivudal book and its author: this will be a book that in all of the hoopla, its film adaptation and the like will be the one reference point to Mexico in American culture for a long time,
And the book fails miserably in the basic ethical and aesthetic problem of representing Mexico to the Americans in a time in which Anti-Mexican sentiment has been weaponized with very real consequences from the caging of children to the bullying of the Mexican government.
It also unfolds the toxic idea that Mexico is the site of nothing but violence and the US is a safe haven, which after El Paso and after years of deaths of migrants all over the place is a dangerous and violent thought.
The sad part is that just last year we had a very good book by a Mexican writer (Luiselli), a very good travel book by a white US writer who actually writes about Mexico with curiosity and intelligence (Theroux) and the release of many books by Latinx authors
who treat Mexico and Mexican culture with urgency and intelligence: Reyna Grande, Jason DeLeon, Erika Sánchez, Wendy Treviño, Gurba herself, and a long etc. There is also a new bounty of Mexican books in translation: Melchor, Herrera, Pitol, Boullosa and many others.
I don't think that Anti-Mexican politics are ever going to go away, but they can only be fought if we urgently teach, read and write Mexico in its complexity, with as little stereotypes as possible, showing it as a great country which is at the same time in a fraught juncture.
And always emphasizing that Mexican is not a race, and that our class, gender, race, regional and other difference are crucial to our culture and our history. As a professor of Mexican Studies, this is my mission everyday,
and fighting the ignorance about Mexico and Mexicans by Americans is more urgent than ever. In this urgency, American Dirt is a blow to the stomach, a regression and an insult.
Here are some of the must-read pieces. First and foremost, Gurba's: tropicsofmeta.com/2019/12/12/pen…
David Bowles: medium.com/@davidbowles/n…
Parul Sehgal: nytimes.com/2020/01/17/boo…
And a roundup from the Seattle Review of Books: seattlereviewofbooks.com/notes/2020/01/…
Also: the Studio behind Eastwood’s The Mule, a racist film even by his own standards (but praised by Richard Brody) is adapting American Dirt
Another piece: thebluenib.com/a-poor-imitati…
