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American Dirt

59 pages • 1 hour read

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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

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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

Jeanine cummins, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

When three gunmen storm his cousin’s quinceañera party, eight-year-old Luca and his mother, Lydia , are already in the bathroom. Lydia quickly pushes Luca into the shower, and they hide while three gunmen slay the 16 members of their family who were outside. The target of the attack was Lydia’s husband, Sebastián , an investigative reporter who writes about cartels, and the perpetrator is Lydia’s friend, Javier , jefe of the local cartel, “Los Jardineros.” When Lydia realizes Javier’s men will likely return to kill her and Luca, she prepares to flee. They travel around town gathering provisions and eventually check into a hotel under a false name. Once they head to their room, the front desk clerk uses a burner phone to alert an unnamed person of their arrival.

In flashbacks, the narration describes the origins of Lydia’s friendship with Javier, with whom Lydia began a flirtatious friendship after he bought two of her favorite books at the bookstore she owns. On the night of her 32nd birthday, Lydia and Sebastián discussed the relative peace Acapulco was enjoying at the time, which Sebastián speculates attributed to the new jefe of Los Jardineros. Something about Sebastián’s description of the man jogged Lydia’s memory, and she secretly looked through Sebastián’s notes and discovered that the new jefe was, in fact, Javier. Following this revelation, Lydia told Javier she knew the truth about him and ended their friendship.

In the present, Lydia wakes up at the hotel the next morning and orders room service. When the service delivery boy brings in the breakfast tray, he also offers Lydia a package: a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera and a note from Javier. Lydia realizes she and Luca are in danger, so they immediately pack up their things and flee, heading to the bus depot to purchase tickets to Mexico City. On the way to Mexico City, Lydia decides to get off the bus at Chilpancingo to avoid the cartels at the roadblocks.

At an Internet café, she looks up Sebastián’s friend, Carlos , and goes to see him. Carlos and his wife, Meredith , are involved in missionary work and help Lydia and Luca evade the cartels and escape Mexico by hiding in a church van transporting an American church group to the airport. At the airport, Lydia decides they will fly north, but she cannot purchase tickets because she is missing Luca’s birth certificate. Desperate to get out of the country, she decides they will attempt to travel via La Bestia, the notoriously dangerous system of freight trains that clandestine migrants hop to get to the border.

Lydia and Luca meet two migrants from Honduras on their walk to the tracks. One explains that new fences have been constructed around the train, requiring migrants to board while the train is already in motion. Lydia becomes discouraged, thinking the maneuver will be too dangerous. She and Luca eventually check in to the Casa del Migrante. That night, Luca sees a young man ( Lorenzo ) being kicked out of the Casa. The next morning, Lydia learns that the man sexually assaulted someone and is rumored to be in a cartel; Lydia fears he’s associated with Los Jardineros.

After leaving the Casa, Lydia and Luca meet two teenaged sisters from Honduras, Soledad and Rebeca . Soledad and Rebeca convince Lydia and Luca to jump onto La Bestia from an overpass, and they board for the first time.

The following day, Lydia, Luca, Soledad, and Rebeca head south to catch the train on the Pacific Route, which is supposedly safest. On the southbound train, Rebeca tells Luca that she and Soledad are also fleeing a dangerous man. On the train the following day, Luca spots Lorenzo. Lydia is unconcerned until she learns about his Los Jardineros tattoo. Lorenzo walks over and introduces himself. He recognizes Lydia from a photo Javier shared with him and tells her that it is a miracle she got out of Acapulco alive.

The next leg of the journey is dangerous, so the migrants disembark at Guadalajara and proceed on foot. Lydia is suspicious of Lorenzo, so she walks with him and asks him questions. He informs her that Javier’s daughter, Marta , hanged herself after reading Sebastián’s article. The news of Marta’s death fueled a grief-fueled rampage, and Javier murdered Lydia’s entire family in retaliation. Lydia is almost sad for Javier but vows never to forgive him.

La Bestia soon crosses into Sinaloa, a notoriously dangerous state for migrants. Soledad and Rebeca tell Lydia about the coyote (a person who smuggles migrants from Mexico to the United States) they will use to get across the border. Then la migra (the immigration police) appear, and all the migrants are detained. Soledad and Rebeca are separated from the group. When they rejoin the group, it is clear they have been raped. Lydia and Luca are the first to be released. Luca refuses to abandon Soledad and Rebeca, however, so Lydia uses the rest of her cash to buy their freedom.

When the group boards La Bestia again it stalls for three nights, narrowly escaping another encounter with la migra near the border. Back on the train the next morning, they see migrants riding on top of the southbound trains. A boy, Beto , hops off one of those trains and onto theirs. He approaches Luca and starts talking. He explains that the migrants on the southbound trains are recent deportees from the U.S.

When the train gets to Nogales, Soledad and Rebeca call the coyote, El Chacal . He is reluctant to take Lydia and the children along but concedes for a higher price. The group spends a couple days in an apartment waiting for the other migrants to show up; one of them ends up being Lorenzo.

On departure day, three trucks drive the migrants into the desert at sunset. On the way, they have to stop to pay off immigration officials. After three hours of driving, they begin the long hike to the border. On the first night, they are forced stop and hide to avoid Border Patrol, and later because vigilante trucks are parked at a trailhead. After many dreadful hours hiking in unbearably hot conditions, the group finally makes it to camp, and everyone falls asleep.

The group sets out again when the sun begins to set. Later, heavy rain causes a flash flood. Ricardín , one of the migrants, gets caught in the flood and breaks his leg. His godfather, Choncho , stays in the desert with him while the group continues their hike. Luca prays that Choncho and Ricardín are able to make it to the Ruby Road, where they will be able to get help.

At camp, the remaining migrants change into dry clothes and try to sleep. Later that night, Lorenzo tries to rape Rebeca. Soledad interferes and shoots him with El Chacal’s gun. Because the shot might have disclosed their presence, the group is forced to start their hike three hours early when it is still very hot. While they are packing, Lydia spots Lorenzo’s cell phone and brings it to his body. She turns it on and discovers that Lorenzo had been in touch with Javier the whole time. She decides to call Javier and ask him if he is disappointed that she and Luca are still alive. Javier tells her that he never wanted her dead in the first place—if he did, she’d be dead by now. Lydia then tells him that he had no right to do what he did.

When Lydia gets back to camp, the group has already begun walking. There are fewer than two miles to go, but it is still very hot. Beto, who is asthmatic, struggles to breathe and soon dies. Everyone is devastated. El Chacal promises to return for Beto’s body, and the group carries on. They make it to the campsite where two RVs have been waiting for them. The migrants say goodbye to El Chacal and begin the 45-minute drive to Tucson.

A few weeks later, Lydia and Luca are living in Maryland with Soledad, Rebeca, their cousin, César , his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s mother. Lydia works as a house cleaner, and Luca is in school. Though her immigration status presents its own challenges, and though she and Luca continue to mourn the many friends and loved ones they’ve lost along the way, Lydia is grateful for the resilience that carried her and Luca to safety, and she resolves to make the best of their new life in the U.S.

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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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American Dirt

By jeanine cummins.

Book review, full book summary 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 .

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

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

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Creep: Accusations and Confessions

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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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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Watch CBS News

Teens come up with trigonometry proof for Pythagorean Theorem, a problem that stumped math world for centuries

By Bill Whitaker

May 5, 2024 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News

As the school year ends, many students will be only too happy to see math classes in their rearview mirrors. It may seem to some of us non-mathematicians that geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form of torture, so imagine our amazement when we heard two high school seniors had proved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. 

We met Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson at their all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans. We expected to find two mathematical prodigies.

Instead, we found at St. Mary's Academy , all students are told their possibilities are boundless.

Come Mardi Gras season, New Orleans is alive with colorful parades, replete with floats, and beads, and high school marching bands.

In a city where uniqueness is celebrated, St. Mary's stands out – with young African American women playing trombones and tubas, twirling batons and dancing - doing it all, which defines St. Mary's, students told us.

Junior Christina Blazio says the school instills in them they have the ability to accomplish anything. 

Christina Blazio: That is kinda a standard here. So we aim very high - like, our aim is excellence for all students. 

The private Catholic elementary and high school sits behind the Sisters of the Holy Family Convent in New Orleans East. The academy was started by an African American nun for young Black women just after the Civil War. The church still supports the school with the help of alumni.

In December 2022, seniors Ne'Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson were working on a school-wide math contest that came with a cash prize.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: I was motivated because there was a monetary incentive.

Calcea Johnson: 'Cause I was like, "$500 is a lot of money. So I-- I would like to at least try."

Both were staring down the thorny bonus question.

Bill Whitaker: So tell me, what was this bonus question?

Calcea Johnson: It was to create a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. And it kind of gave you a few guidelines on how would you start a proof.

The seniors were familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem, a fundamental principle of geometry. You may remember it from high school: a² + b² = c². In plain English, when you know the length of two sides of a right triangle, you can figure out the length of the third.

Both had studied geometry and some trigonometry, and both told us math was not easy. What no one told  them  was there had been more than 300 documented proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem using algebra and geometry, but for 2,000 years a proof using trigonometry was thought to be impossible, … and that was the bonus question facing them.

Bill Whitaker: When you looked at the question did you think, "Boy, this is hard"?

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Yeah. 

Bill Whitaker: What motivated you to say, "Well, I'm going to try this"?

Calcea Johnson: I think I was like, "I started something. I need to finish it." 

Bill Whitaker: So you just kept on going.

Calcea Johnson: Yeah.

For two months that winter, they spent almost all their free time working on the proof.

CeCe Johnson: She was like, "Mom, this is a little bit too much."

CeCe and Cal Johnson are Calcea's parents.

CeCe Johnson:   So then I started looking at what she really was doing. And it was pages and pages and pages of, like, over 20 or 30 pages for this one problem.

Cal Johnson: Yeah, the garbage can was full of papers, which she would, you know, work out the problems and-- if that didn't work she would ball it up, throw it in the trash. 

Bill Whitaker: Did you look at the problem? 

Neliska Jackson is Ne'Kiya's mother.

Neliska Jackson: Personally I did not. 'Cause most of the time I don't understand what she's doing (laughter).

Michelle Blouin Williams: What if we did this, what if I write this? Does this help? ax² plus ….

Their math teacher, Michelle Blouin Williams, initiated the math contest.

Bill Whitaker: And did you think anyone would solve it?

Michelle Blouin Williams: Well, I wasn't necessarily looking for a solve. So, no, I didn't—

Bill Whitaker: What were you looking for?

Michelle Blouin Williams: I was just looking for some ingenuity, you know—

Calcea and Ne'Kiya delivered on that! They tried to explain their groundbreaking work to 60 Minutes. Calcea's proof is appropriately titled the Waffle Cone.

Calcea Johnson: So to start the proof, we start with just a regular right triangle where the angle in the corner is 90°. And the two angles are alpha and beta.

Bill Whitaker: Uh-huh

Calcea Johnson: So then what we do next is we draw a second congruent, which means they're equal in size. But then we start creating similar but smaller right triangles going in a pattern like this. And then it continues for infinity. And eventually it creates this larger waffle cone shape.

Calcea Johnson: Am I going a little too—

Bill Whitaker: You've been beyond me since the beginning. (laughter) 

Bill Whitaker: So how did you figure out the proof?

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Okay. So you have a right triangle, 90° angle, alpha and beta.

Bill Whitaker: Then what did you do?

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Okay, I have a right triangle inside of the circle. And I have a perpendicular bisector at OP to divide the triangle to make that small right triangle. And that's basically what I used for the proof. That's the proof.

Bill Whitaker: That's what I call amazing.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Well, thank you.

There had been one other documented proof of the theorem using trigonometry by mathematician Jason Zimba in 2009 – one in 2,000 years. Now it seems Ne'Kiya and Calcea have joined perhaps the most exclusive club in mathematics. 

Bill Whitaker: So you both independently came up with proof that only used trigonometry.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: So are you math geniuses?

Calcea Johnson: I think that's a stretch. 

Bill Whitaker: If not genius, you're really smart at math.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Not at all. (laugh) 

To document Calcea and Ne'Kiya's work, math teachers at St. Mary's submitted their proofs to an American Mathematical Society conference in Atlanta in March 2023.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Well, our teacher approached us and was like, "Hey, you might be able to actually present this," I was like, "Are you joking?" But she wasn't. So we went. I got up there. We presented and it went well, and it blew up.

Bill Whitaker: It blew up.

Calcea Johnson: Yeah. 

Ne'Kiya Jackson: It blew up.

Bill Whitaker: Yeah. What was the blowup like?

Calcea Johnson: Insane, unexpected, crazy, honestly.

It took millenia to prove, but just a minute for word of their accomplishment to go around the world. They got a write-up in South Korea and a shout-out from former first lady Michelle Obama, a commendation from the governor and keys to the city of New Orleans. 

Bill Whitaker: Why do you think so many people found what you did to be so impressive?

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Probably because we're African American, one. And we're also women. So I think-- oh, and our age. Of course our ages probably played a big part.

Bill Whitaker: So you think people were surprised that young African American women, could do such a thing?

Calcea Johnson: Yeah, definitely.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: I'd like to actually be celebrated for what it is. Like, it's a great mathematical achievement.

Achievement, that's a word you hear often around St. Mary's academy. Calcea and Ne'Kiya follow a long line of barrier-breaking graduates. 

The late queen of Creole cooking, Leah Chase , was an alum. so was the first African-American female New Orleans police chief, Michelle Woodfork …

And judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Dana Douglas. Math teacher Michelle Blouin Williams told us Calcea and Ne'Kiya are typical St. Mary's students.  

Bill Whitaker: They're not unicorns.

Michelle Blouin Williams: Oh, no no. If they are unicorns, then every single lady that has matriculated through this school is a beautiful, Black unicorn.

Pamela Rogers: You're good?

Pamela Rogers, St. Mary's president and interim principal, told us the students hear that message from the moment they walk in the door.

Pamela Rogers: We believe all students can succeed, all students can learn. It does not matter the environment that you live in. 

Bill Whitaker: So when word went out that two of your students had solved this almost impossible math problem, were they universally applauded?

Pamela Rogers: In this community, they were greatly applauded. Across the country, there were many naysayers.

Bill Whitaker: What were they saying?

Pamela Rogers: They were saying, "Oh, they could not have done it. African Americans don't have the brains to do it." Of course, we sheltered our girls from that. But we absolutely did not expect it to come in the volume that it came.  

Bill Whitaker: And after such a wonderful achievement.

Pamela Rogers: People-- have a vision of who can be successful. And-- to some people, it is not always an African American female. And to us, it's always an African American female.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: What we know is when teachers lay out some expectations that say, "You can do this," kids will work as hard as they can to do it.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, has studied how best to teach African American students. She told us an encouraging teacher can change a life.

Bill Whitaker: And what's the difference, say, between having a teacher like that and a whole school dedicated to the excellence of these students?

Gloria Ladson-Billings: So a whole school is almost like being in Heaven. 

Bill Whitaker: What do you mean by that?

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Many of our young people have their ceilings lowered, that somewhere around fourth or fifth grade, their thoughts are, "I'm not going to be anything special." What I think is probably happening at St. Mary's is young women come in as, perhaps, ninth graders and are told, "Here's what we expect to happen. And here's how we're going to help you get there."

At St. Mary's, half the students get scholarships, subsidized by fundraising to defray the $8,000 a year tuition. Here, there's no test to get in, but expectations are high and rules are strict: no cellphones, modest skirts, hair must be its natural color.

Students Rayah Siddiq, Summer Forde, Carissa Washington, Tatum Williams and Christina Blazio told us they appreciate the rules and rigor.

Rayah Siddiq: Especially the standards that they set for us. They're very high. And I don't think that's ever going to change.

Bill Whitaker: So is there a heart, a philosophy, an essence to St. Mary's?

Summer Forde: The sisterhood—

Carissa Washington: Sisterhood.

Tatum Williams: Sisterhood.

Bill Whitaker: The sisterhood?

Voices: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: And you don't mean the nuns. You mean-- (laughter)

Christina Blazio: I mean, yeah. The community—

Bill Whitaker: So when you're here, there's just no question that you're going to go on to college.

Rayah Siddiq: College is all they talk about. (laughter) 

Pamela Rogers: … and Arizona State University (Cheering)

Principal Rogers announces to her 615 students the colleges where every senior has been accepted.

Bill Whitaker: So for 17 years, you've had a 100% graduation rate—

Pamela Rogers: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: --and a 100% college acceptance rate?

Pamela Rogers: That's correct.

Last year when Ne'Kiya and Calcea graduated, all their classmates went to college and got scholarships. Ne'Kiya got a full ride to the pharmacy school at Xavier University in New Orleans. Calcea, the class valedictorian, is studying environmental engineering at Louisiana State University.

Bill Whitaker: So wait a minute. Neither one of you is going to pursue a career in math?

Both: No. (laugh)

Calcea Johnson: I may take up a minor in math. But I don't want that to be my job job.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Yeah. People might expect too much out of me if (laugh) I become a mathematician. (laugh)

But math is not completely in their rear-view mirrors. This spring they submitted their high school proofs for final peer review and publication … and are still working on further proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. Since their first two …

Calcea Johnson: We found five. And then we found a general format that could potentially produce at least five additional proofs.

Bill Whitaker: And you're not math geniuses?

Bill Whitaker: I'm not buying it. (laughs)

Produced by Sara Kuzmarov. Associate producer, Mariah B. Campbell. Edited by Daniel J. Glucksman.

Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.

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What lies beneath Gaza’s rubble and ruin

The hysteria over campus protests in the United States has shifted American attention away from the depth of the ongoing calamity in Gaza.

You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free , including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.

In a fit of ideological pique last week, far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) scoffed at protesters agitating against pro-Israel policies on campuses across the United States . “I get a strange inkling that all these Columbia and UCLA students running around yelling ‘Free Palestine’ would not be jumping at the opportunity to do a semester abroad in Gaza,” she wrote on social media , before later journeying to a protest encampment at George Washington University and almost sparring with students when trying to pull down a Palestinian flag.

Boebert’s scorn is shared even by some of her opponents in the Washington establishment, many of whom have cast the student demonstrations as, at best, unproductive far-left agitprop or, more darkly, dangerous antisemitic behavior that must be expunged from the academy. Hundreds of campus protesters have been arrested in recent days in police crackdowns from California to New York.

Boebert’s comment, though, drew derision on two counts: First, that protesters angry about alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza would need to go to the besieged territory itself to justify their anger. And, second, that students could even do “a semester abroad” in Gaza, where Israel has spent the past half year systematically destroying most of its educational institutions, including all of its universities .

For months, Palestinian civil society activists have drawn attention to the steady eradication of Gaza’s cultural patrimony. Israel’s punishing campaign against militant group Hamas has seen much of the territory reduced to ruin. In the process, many libraries, museums and colleges have been ransacked and razed — in some instances, by deliberate Israeli demolition. Thousands of artifacts in various collections, including Roman coins and other materials from Gaza’s pre-Islamic past, have been potentially lost during the war .

The hysteria over campus protests in the United States has shifted American attention away from the depth of the ongoing calamity in Gaza. U.N. officials and aid agencies are still grappling with the scale of the destruction in the territory, where dozens are still dying every day. Since Hamas launched its Oct. 7 terrorist strike on southern Israel, more than 34,500 Palestinians in the territory — many of them women and children — have been killed. Some 5 percent of Gaza’s overall population has been killed or injured, according to a U.N. report that cites local data.

That figure doesn’t include the more than at least 10,000 people that the U.N. estimates are still missing beneath the rubble, citing the Palestinian Civil Defense (PCD). The challenge of finding the missing is growing more dire, given the widespread destruction of heavy machinery and equipment needed to dig through the debris.

“Rising temperatures can accelerate the decomposition of bodies and the spread of disease,” the U.N. humanitarian affairs office said in a statement , adding that the PCD was appealing to “all relevant stakeholders to urgently intervene to allow the entry of needed equipment, including bulldozers and excavators, to avert a public health catastrophe, facilitate dignified burials, and save the lives of injured people.”

Sifting through Gaza’s wreckage will be no simple task. Israel has dumped a huge amount of ordnance on the territory. Mungo Birch, head of the U.N. Mine Action Program in Palestinian territory, said last week that the amount of unexploded missiles and bombs lying in the rubble is “unprecedented” since World War II. He said tiny Gaza is a site of some 37 million tons of rubble — more than what’s been generated across all of Ukraine during Russia’s war — and 800,000 tons of asbestos and other contaminants. He said his agency has only a fraction of the funding it needs to begin clearing operations whenever the war ends.

Over the weekend, U.S. and Egyptian officials attempted to facilitate a last-ditch effort to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas . A delegation from the Palestinian militant group was in Cairo and expressed optimism that a breakthrough could be found. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faced mass protests at home against his continued tenure in office, seemed more wary of the arrangement and remains bent on carrying out a full offensive against the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians already displaced in the territory have taken shelter.

Top U.N. officials say famine has already gripped parts of Gaza. Beyond the desperately insufficient trickle of humanitarian aid into the territory, the war has also “severely hampered” Gaza’s “ability to produce food and clean water,” according to my colleagues . “Israeli airstrikes and bulldozers have razed farms and orchards. Crops abandoned by farmers seeking safety in southern Gaza have withered, and cattle have been left to die.”

The fear surrounding Rafah and the uncertainty over a potential cease-fire sit against the looming reality of how difficult it will be for Gaza to recover. More than 70 percent of all housing in the territory has been destroyed. A report by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) found that the war has reversed 40 years of development and improvement in social indicators such as life expectancy, health and educational attainment in Gaza.

The agency estimated that reconstruction, at this point, would cost some $40 billion to $50 billion. And if it follows the pace observed after previous conflicts, UNDP estimates that it will take “approximately 80 years to restore all the fully destroyed housing units” in Gaza.

“My very big concern — in addition to the numbers — is the breaking down of communities and families in Gaza,” UNDP regional director Abdallah al-Dardari told The Washington Post . “If you know 60 people in your family have been killed — like our colleague Issam al-Mughrabi who was killed with 60 people in his family during one raid — you will go numb,” Dardari said. “The consequences of this war will stay with us far beyond the end of the war.”

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Guest Essay

Let’s All Take a Deep Breath About China

By Rory Truex

Dr. Truex is an associate professor at Princeton University whose research focuses on Chinese authoritarianism.

The amygdala is a pair of neural clusters near the base of the brain that assesses danger and can help prompt a fight-or-flight response . A prolonged stress response may contribute to anxiety, which can cause people to perceive danger where there is none and obsess about worst-case scenarios.

America’s collective national body is suffering from a chronic case of China anxiety. Nearly anything with the word “Chinese” in front of it now triggers a fear response in our political system, muddling our ability to properly gauge and contextualize threats. This has led the U.S. government and American politicians to pursue policies grounded in repression and exclusion, mirroring the authoritarian system that they seek to combat.

Congress has moved to force the sale of TikTok , the Chinese-owned social media application; some states have sought restrictions on Chinese individuals or entities owning U.S. land and on Chinese researchers working in American universities ; and the federal government has barred certain Chinese technology firms from competing in our markets. These measures all have a national security rationale, and it is not my intention here to weigh the merits of every one. But collectively they are yielding a United States that is fundamentally more closed — and more like China in meaningful ways.

When you are constantly anxious, no threat is too small. In January, Rick Scott, a senator from Florida, introduced legislation that would ban imports of Chinese garlic, which he suggested could be a threat to U.S. national security , citing reports that it is fertilized with human sewage. In 2017, scientists at McGill University wrote there is no evidence that this is the case. Even if it was, it’s common practice to use human waste, known as “biosolids,” as fertilizer in many countries, including the United States.

More recently, Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Elise Stefanik introduced legislation that would bar the Department of Defense from contracting with Tutor.com, a U.S.-based tutoring company, on the grounds that it poses a threat to national security because it was purchased by Primavera Capital Group, an investment firm based in Hong Kong. Their argument is that this could give the Chinese government backdoor access to the tutoring sessions and personal information of American military personnel who use the firm’s service.

The legislation does not mention that Tutor.com’s student data is housed in the United States , that it volunteered for a security review by the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and that it created additional levels of data security protection in coordination with the U.S. government. The bill also does not specify how exactly the Chinese government would get access to Tutor.com’s data or what use it would actually have for information on the tutoring sessions of U.S. military personnel.

Last summer, several Republican lawmakers cried foul over the “Barbie” movie because a world map briefly shown in the background of one scene included a dashed line. They took this as a reference to China’s “nine-dashed line,” which Beijing uses to buttress its disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea. According to Representative Jim Banks, this is “endangering our national security.” The map in the movie is clearly fantastical, had only eight dashes and bore no resemblance to China’s line. Even the Philippine government, which has for years been embroiled in territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, dismissed the controversy and approved the movie’s domestic release.

Of course, the United States should actively confront President Xi Jinping of China about his repression at home and aggression abroad. As a scholar of China’s political system, I worry about how Mr. Xi has made his country even more authoritarian; about increasing human rights abuses in China, particularly those directed at the Uyghur population in Xinjiang ; about Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, its threats toward Taiwan, its increasingly cozy relationship with Russia and its support for the war in Ukraine . America must remain alert to legitimate concerns about well-documented Chinese activities such as espionage and cyberattacks.

But should our policymakers really be focusing on Tutor.com, Chinese garlic or “Barbie”? Or should they concentrate on the more serious threats posed by China’s authoritarian system, or the many other issues that meaningfully affect the day-to-day lives of Americans?

Perhaps the most worrisome effect is that China anxiety is slowly creeping toward discrimination against Chinese Americans, a new “yellow peril.” We’ve already seen how an initiative begun during the Trump administration to target Chinese espionage led to unfair scrutiny of Chinese researchers and even Asian American government employees, leading to the program being terminated in 2022. And we saw how xenophobia during the pandemic triggered threats and attacks against Asian Americans. There also have been numerous reports of law enforcement officials interrogating Chinese students and researchers traveling to and from China on the grounds that they may be agents of the Chinese state. Again, this treatment — being brought in for questioning by the police or government officials — is something foreign scholars experience in China , where it is euphemistically referred to as “being invited for tea.”

Last year, state legislators in Texas proposed a bill that initially sought to prevent Chinese (as well as Iranian, North Korean and Russian) citizens and entities from buying land, homes or other real estate, citing concerns about the security of the food supply. Putting aside the fact that Chinese citizens are not the Chinese government, the actual amount of American farmland owned by Chinese entities is negligible — never exceeding 1 percent of farmland in any given American state as of 2021. The bill ultimately failed , but only after substantial pushback from the Chinese American community.

This China panic, also stirred up by both liberal and conservative U.S. media, may be influencing how average people perceive their fellow Americans of Chinese heritage. Michael Cerny, a fellow China researcher, and I recently surveyed over 2,500 Americans on the question of whether Chinese Americans who were born in the United States should be allowed to serve in the U.S. intelligence community. Roughly 27 percent said Chinese Americans’ access to classified information should be more limited than for other U.S. citizens, and 14 percent said they should be allowed no access at all.

This is overt racism, and while not the majority opinion, it is concerning that so many Americans are blurring the line between the Chinese government and people of Chinese ethnicity, mirroring the language of our politicians.

China is a formidable geopolitical rival. But there is no world in which garlic, “Barbie” or a tutoring site poses meaningful threats to American national security. Labeling them as such reveals a certain lack of seriousness in our policy discourse.

If the United States is to properly compete with China, it’s going to require healthy, balanced policymaking that protects U.S. national security without compromising core American values.

Let’s take a deep breath.

Rory Truex (@rorytruex) is an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on Chinese politics and authoritarian rule.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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