What About Your Grandmother, Jeanine?
Tsunami Evacuation Sign, San Juan. Photograph by Lorie Shaull, Flickr There’s a saying in the Puerto Rican community, when one of us claims to be white: ¿Y tu abuela aonde ‘ta? This essentially translates to, “What about your grandmother?” Puerto Ricans are a racially mixed nation descending from enslaved Africans, indigenous Taínos, and Spanish colonizers. Any Puerto Rican who claims whiteness is forgetting someone in their lineage. But whiteness is ultimately a state of forgetting, anyway.
Jeanine Cummins, author of the novel American Dirt, has a Puerto Rican grandmother. And though she identified herself as white in a 2015 New York Times interview, she seems lately to have taken that Puerto Rican saying to heart, identifying as Latinx in recent media appearances—just in time for the release of her novel, which has come under fire for the way she depicts its Mexican characters.
Cummins received a seven-figure advance for the novel, about a woman and her son who flee to the US to escape cartel-related violence in Mexico. Even before the book was published, many Latinx critics—including Myriam Gurba, Chicana author of , and Roberto Lovato, Salvadoran author of —took Cummins to task for what they termed her “white savior complex.” , David Bowles, a Mexican American author who teaches at the University of Texas, wrote, “The telenovela plot is a pastiche of stereotypes and melodramatic tropes of the sort one might expect from an author who did not
