American Dirt Review

I read this book exactly because I had heard beforehand of the various controversies that surrounded it. I’ll be honest, I found it a positive read. I took it as it was, a work of fiction. A book that wanted to raise awareness around the problems and difficulties that Mexican immigrants face daily when crossing the border. A book that wanted to somehow honour their lives and their cultures. I didn’t find it racist, for each negative word spent on the violence rate in Mexico, there was another one about the beauty of its landscapes, the culture of its people. I didn’t care about the nationality, race or colour of the writer. It didn’t matter. The book and the writer had never had the arrogance to declare themselves a documentary or a memoir. The words were clearly stamped on the foreword. Fiction. Yes, the writer’s husband was an illegal immigrant. No, she never said that she knew what he had gone through. She just wanted to know more about this process. She took five years in the making, she went to Mexico multiple times. She did her research, she did was she could. Probably there were mistakes, exaggerations even, I’m not Mexican, I’ll admit it, I’m ignorant. And obviously, a Mexican writer would have put it better, they would have been more accurate, without doubt. And I will look for more books related to immigration and written by a Latino writer. But I’m not going to “stand” here, shouting that these people’s hardships were used just for money’s sake. We don’t know the woman, we can’t make assumptions like that. And I personally think that if she cared about the money she would have not spent five years writing about such a difficult topic. Finally, I rate this book four stars. Not five, because parts of it were put down maybe too naïvely, but it did teach me things I didn’t know and it pushed me into finding more about the history of Mexican immigrants. So yes, this book did its job.