It is beautifully ironic that @DavidOBowles’s hit job on @jeaninecummins’s #AmericanDirt—in which he criticizes her book for cultural appropriation and poor Spanish dialogue—uses “Latinx” to refer to people from Latin America. nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opi… While Bowles is no doubt… /1
…a well-regarded Mexican-American author and translator w/the expertise to criticize Cummins’s work on the merits, it’s hard to take his complaints of “white saviorism” + bad Spanish seriously when he offers no evidence of it and himself uses a term almost no Hispanics use…/2
…to describe themselves. thinknow.com/blog/the-great… I sincerely doubt many of Bowles’s Latino/a neighbors in the Valley use "Latinx," regardless of their education, income or immigration status; at least that’s my experience here. Indeed, some Latinos view “Latinx” as itself…. /3
…imperialist! motherjones.com/media/2019/06/…
But Bowles’s own cultural imperialism is not his worst sin; that would be his disingenuous description of Cummins’s heritage. He says she “has a Puerto Rican grandmother and identifies as white”—which clearly suggests she's not Latina. /4
But Bowles’s own cultural imperialism is not his worst sin; that would be his disingenuous description of Cummins’s heritage. He says she “has a Puerto Rican grandmother and identifies as white”—which clearly suggests she's not Latina. /4
But in fact, she does identify as Latina! nytimes.com/2020/01/13/boo… Bowles knows this, and knows how demeaning it is to have one's ethnicity questioned. Yet, to bolster his claim of cultural appropriation, he chose to ignore her self-identification. Yuck! /5
Look, I’m glad to read critics of #AmericanDirt describe its flaws on the merits. Like Myriam Gurba, who complains that Cummins wrongly depicts Mexico as lawless and violent country. tropicsofmeta.com/2019/12/12/pen… But I also listen to Mexican immigrants I know, some of whom disagree. /6
(Literally last week, a Mexican-American twenty-something I know sorrowfully told me of his grandmother’s passing, and worse, that he could not attend her funeral in Mexico b/c his parents deemed the trip too dangerous.) So people can have legitimate disagreements about... /7
...these issues, and argument about them is fine. But falsely whitewashing someone ethnicity to serve a point is not ok. And it should not matter whether Cummins is Latina or not, since she did not purport to write based on personal experience, but rather, based on research. /8
I therefore urge readers to take Bowles's comments w/a grain of salt; yes, he speaks from personal experience, but he has his own cultural biases, and who knows if his views represent those of mainstream Mexican-Americans, immigrant or otherwise? Perhaps like @salmahayek, he.../9
... didn't even read the book before tweeting about it!? (That said, Bowles did do readers one great service, linking to an extended discussion of #AmericanDirt's flaws by David J Schmidt: thebluenib.com/a-poor-imitati… More on @SchmidtTales's critiques of #AmericanDirt, later. )/10
I also urge readers to be deeply skeptical of someone like Bowles, who misrepresents another author's identity to help bolster his attacks on her. Implying that Cummins doesn't identify as Latino isn't argument, it's ad hominem. But perhaps that is to be expected from... /11
...someone like Bowles, who seems to care less about quality than identity. As I read his vulgar tweets about Cummins, his concern about #AmericanDirt is not whether her book is accurate, but whether she is “Latina enough” to have written it. Really? /12
Apparently, Bowles hails from the #stayinyourlane crowd—writers who believe that authors should be permitted to publish only about their own narrow experience (gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, etc). While purporting to promote diversity of authorship (#OwnVoices), they... /13
...instead spend more time attacking other authors for who they are, rather than describing actual innaccuracies in a book. #StayinYourLane is a terrible idea, not just b/c it would decrease diversity within any book, but b/c undermines a key purpose of literature—helping.../14
...readers try (however imperfectly) to walk in the shoes of others. That is not to say that the publishing industry ought not do a better job of finding & publishing the works of #OwnVoices authors; it's just that the reason for doing so ought to be quality, not identity. /15
Which leads us back to the aforementioned David Schmidt (of the detailed takedown of #AmericanDirt). He, too, urges publishers to find more diverse authors. But he does so by showing how Cummins's writing is derivative of, and inferior to, that of... huffpost.com/entry/american… /16
...other authors—with detailed examples. Further, Schmidt is explicit that his criticism is NOT that a non-Mexican author wrote about Mexico. This critique warrants serious attention from publishers, unlike the views of Bowles's #stayinyourlane crowd./fin
So shame on Bowles for attacking one woman’s perspective on the immigration experience rather than offering up his own, better perspective to publishers. Personally, I urge him to stop whining about Cummins’s book #AmericanDirt and write his own, better one. I'd buy it. /coda
