‘Children of the Land’: Featured Fiction from Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
In our latest edition of featured fiction—curated by our own Carolyn Quimby—we present an excerpt from Children of the Land by poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, out now from Harper.
Publishers Weekly, in its starred review, called the book an “impressionistic memoir of growing up as an undocumented immigrant,” adding that “Castillo writes with disturbing candor, depicting the all-too-common plight of undocumented immigrants to the U.S.”
[Fourth Movement as Language]
I got used to the roaches, I got used to the milk crates we used as chairs as we ate a pot of boiled beans and washed them down with black coffee for dinner. I was five, and we had just moved into our first apartment in the U.S., and though it was small, it still felt larger than our house back in Mexico. It certainly felt larger than the room we all crammed into at our uncle’s house when we first arrived, care- ful not to be too much of a burden, though it was hard not to be when a family of seven suddenly moves in. Amá’s belly was large, and she was due to
