American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

Published by Flatiron Books on January 21, 2020

So much of American Dirt is either tense or heartbreaking that it is a relief to reach the end. This is such a powerful and moving novel that only the emptiest of hearts could remain untouched by the story.

American Dirt imagines that the most ruthless cartel leader in Acapulco, a man named Javier Fuentes, is a sensitive soul and an avid reader, a man who discusses poetry with his daughter and literature with a bookstore owner named Lydia Pérez. Lydia’s husband, Sebastián Pérez Delgado, is a reporter who does not let threats deter him from writing about the cartels. When he writes about Javier, cartel members murder Sebastián and sixteen members of his extended family. Only Lydia and her son Luca escape. Lydia eventually learns the reason for Javier’s extreme response, but her immediate need is to flee before Javier’s cartel kills her son.

American Dirt follow Lydia on her harrowing journey from Acapulco to the United States. As Lydia is trying to understand how to ride on top of a northbound train (la Bestia), she meets two teenage girls, Rebecca and Soledad, who are fleeing sexual violence in Honduras. The teens encounter more sexual violence on their northbound journey. Those scenes are implied — the text isn’t graphic — but American Dirt is not a book for the squeamish. The sense of realism that Jeanine Cummins conveys is one reason the story is so emotionally distressing.

The narrative is electrifying. Lydia navigates from one danger to another — boarding moving trains with a small child, eluding cartel members and lesser criminals, losing her money to corrupt authorities who kidnap and shake down migrants under the pretense of arresting them, following a coyote on a trek through the Arizona desert that is made more dangerous by flash floods and armed vigilantes who are itching to shoot migrants. The reader rarely has time to take a break from worrying about Lydia and Luca, as well as the other characters who have placed their lives at risk to cross the border illegally because they truly have no better choice.

For all its tragedy, American Dirt reminds the reader that instincts of decency still prompt people to help the less fortunate, sometimes at risk to their own well-being, even as indecent people exploit or attack them. The book is filled with small moments of hope, as people who live in poverty sacrifice to help others who are even less fortunate.

In an Author’s Note at the end of American Dirt, Cummins writes that the world has enough novels about the violent men who call themselves heroes. Cummins says she is more interested in victims, but (although Cummins doesn’t say it) Lydia and Rebecca and Soledad rise above the status of victims. They are heroes because they fight not just for survival, but to preserve their humanity. While some victims shut down or seek revenge when they are wronged, Lydia demonstrates heroic strength; “she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified.”

Cummins’ supple prose is just as remarkable as the story. American Dirt perfectly illustrates the horrors suffered by refugees and other migrants without preaching or politicizing. It is a book featuring almost no Americans that deserves to become an American classic.

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