![]() We fear his very distant cousin, el cucuy.Ĭummins employs this “landscape of carnage,” a turn of phrase which hearkens to Trump’s inaugural speech, to introduce her protagonist, the newly widowed Lydia Quixano Perez. ![]() By invoking monsters with English names and European lineages, Cummins reveals the color of her intended audience: white. By categorizing these characters as “the modern bogeymen of urban Mexico,” she flattens them. Chapter One starts with assassins opening fire on a quinceañera, a fifteenth birthday party, a scene one can easily imagine President Donald Trump breathlessly conjuring at a Midwestern rally, and while Cummins’ executioners are certainly animated, their humanity remains shallow. Toxic heteroromanticism gives the sludge an arc and because the white gaze taints her prose, Cummins positions the United States of America as a magnetic sanctuary, a beacon toward which the story’s chronology chugs.Ĭummins bombards with clichés from the get-go. Cummins plops overly-ripe Mexican stereotypes, among them the Latin lover, the suffering mother, and the stoic manchild, into her wannabe realist prose. Unfortunately, Jeanine Cummins narco-novel, American Dirt, is a literary licuado that tastes like its title. Drop fruit, milk, and ice into a blender and voilà: a meal on-the-go. Making these beverages requires baseline skills. I was notified that I’d be paid a kill fee: 30% of the $650 I was initially offered for my services.īehold my unpublishable cruelty as it rises from the dead! She wrote that though my takedown of Dirt was “spectacular,” I lacked the fame to pen something so “negative.” She offered to reconsider if I changed my wording, if I wrote “something redeeming.”īecause the nicest thing I can say about Dirt is that its pages ought to be upcycled as toilet paper, the editors hauled out the guillotine. Waited.Īfter a few days, an editor responded. ![]() It required that I give myself over to the project of zealously hate-reading the book, filling its margins with phrases like “Pendeja, please.” That’s a Spanglish analogue for “Bitch, please.”īack in Alta California, I sat at my kitchen table and penned my review. In order to choke down Dirt, I developed a survival strategy. I looked up, at a mirror hanging on my tía’s wall. The phrase “these people” pissed me off so bad my blood became carbonated. “The first time Jeanine and I ever talked on the phone,” the publisher gushed, “she said migrants at the Mexican border were being portrayed as a ‘faceless brown mass.’ She said she wanted to give these people a face.” At my tía’s house in Guadalajara, I opened the book.īefore giving me a chance to turn to chapter one, a publisher’s letter made me wince. I accepted her offer, Dirt arrived in my mailbox, and I tossed it in my suitcase. I learned about Dirt when an editor at a feminist magazine invited me to review it. To satisfy this demand, Cummins tossed together American Dirt, a “road thriller” that wears an I’m-giving-a-voice-to-the-voiceless-masses merkin. This denial motivates their spending habits, resulting in a preference for trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf. Pity is what inspires their sweet tooth for Mexican pain, a craving many of them hide. Rather than face that we are their moral and intellectual equals, they happily pity us. Rather than look us in the eye, many gabachos prefer to look down their noses at us. Repackaging them for mass racially “colorblind” consumption.Slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and.Appropriating genius works by people of color.Her obra de caca belongs to the great American tradition of doing the following: It’s my preferred art form, one I began practicing soon after my period first stained my calzones, and what’s literature, and literary criticism, if not painstakingly aestheticized chisme?Ī self-professed gabacha, Jeanine Cummins, wrote a book that sucks. También soy chismosa and if you don’t have the gift of Spanglish, allow me to translate. I follow in the cocky footsteps of my grandfather, Ricardo Serrano Ríos, “decano de los publicistas de Jalisco ,” and not only do I have opinions, I bark them como itzcuintli. It answers, “Yes, bitch, in México, there are things to publicize such as our own fucking opinions about YOU.” I wryly grin at these fulanos and let my smile speak on my behalf. Their heads look ready to explode and I can tell they’re thinking, “In Mexico, there are PUBLICISTS?!” When I tell gringos that my Mexican grandfather worked as a publicist, the news silences them.
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