The Doomed Project of <em>American Dirt</em>

American Dirt, the much discussed new novel from the author Jeanine Cummins, opens with a perfunctory slaughter. While the Mexican bookseller Lydia (most often referred to as Mami) escorts her 8-year-old son, Luca, to the restroom in his grandmother’s Acapulco home, members of a local cartel kill every other member of their family. After unleashing a torrent of bullets—during a quinceañera barbecue, no less—the men of Los Jardineros place a cardboard sign on the body of Lydia’s journalist husband, Sebastián. The message: TODA MI FAMILIA ESTÁ MUERTA POR MI CULPA. It is my fault my entire family is dead.

Thus begins the terror-driven journey at the heart of Cummins’s book. Lydia and Luca must flee the world paints a specific portrait of one grief-stricken mother and child weaving their way through perilous territory in pursuit of a safer life in the United States. But Cummins conceived of the book as part of a larger project, too. In a four-page author’s note at the end of , she writes of her discomfort with how Latino migrants are most often characterized. “At worst, we perceive them 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 says. “We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings ... I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate,” Cummins continued. “When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: These people are people.”