— You’ve most likely caught wind of the controversy surrounding Jeanine Cummins’s newly published novel “American Dirt.” In it, Lydia Quixano Pérez, a Mexican bookseller, finds herself fleeing to the United States with her son Luca, pursued by an obsessed drug cartel boss. But “American Dirt” has now been largely rejected by the very Mexicans and Mexican Americans it was meant to foreground, the “faceless brown mass” Ms. Cummins — who has a Puerto Rican grandmother and identifies as white — sought to humanize. That “brown mass” includes the people in my Mexican-American community here in South Texas. The white saviorism is tough for me to swallow, and not just because I’m a Chicano writer critical of “American Dirt.” My hometown library was chosen in late 2019 to be part of a pilot partnership between Oprah’s Book Club, the American Library Association and local library book groups. The libraries would receive several boxes of books to use with patrons in their book club, as well as other discussion and promotional materials.

Source: New York Times January 27, 2020 12:22 UTC