Book Description Review “This moving memoir is the document of a life without documents, of belonging to two countries yet belonging to neither. Hernandez Castillo has created his own papers fashioned from memory and poetry. His motherland is la madre tierra, his life a history lesson for our times.” (Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street)Honest and unsparing, this book offers a detailed look at the dehumanizing immigration system that shattered the author’s family while offering a glimpse into his own deeply conflicted sense of what it means to live the so-called American dream. < A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate. (Kirkus Reviews)"Castillo writes with disturbing candor, depicting the all-too-common plight of undocumented immigrants to the U.S." (Publishers Weekly (starred review))”Castillo uses his prodigious poetic craft to plumb each family member’s odyssey through the U.S. immigration system…and to describe the raw emotion and pain experienced while…living under a cloud of uncertainty and fear. In the tortured dynamic that plays out in his cross-border family, Castillo lays bare the inherent unfairness and high psychological toll of the current immigration system on people in both the U.S. and Mexico.” (Booklist (starred review))”The award-winning poet turns to memoir with the devastating account of his family’s immigration to the U.S., from terrifying encounters with ICE offers to his father’s ultimate deportation.” (Entertainment Weekly)”In this courageous memoir, Castillo lays bare his emotional truths with remarkable intimacy and insight. Ever the poet, Castillo can’t resist a lyrical stroke here and there, like when he describes arriving in Mexico ‘the same way as the light entered the rosary, and when we departed the corridors of its prisms, we did so no longer wholly intact either, a little broken.’ The same outcome awaits the reader who encounters this book.” (Los Angeles Times) Read more About the Author Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Norther California Book Award and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. He lives in Marysville, California where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program. Read more Customers Review: Castillo is a young-ish (early ’30s) Mexican-American poet. He immigrated to the U.S. with his parents when he was age five. All came in under the radar. When he finally gets his MFA from the University of Michigan he already has his green card, so he’s transitioned from an undocumented Spanish-only speaker to a documented MFA in creative writing with an A+ command of the English language in a relatively short period of time. (What I like to hear more about, though that would be a different story, which he only hints at, is how he was driven to master his new language, and how he did it.)This “memoir” is his story of his journey. He paints pictures of his feelings and the sights around him, including family members, all very much on the surface of things. There are elements of a prose poem. He offers little reflection or analytical thought on his immigrant experience. That’s left up to the reader. What struck me the most is how common, how mundane his life (as he describes it) has been. He’s got some sexuality issues, mental health issues and alcohol and drug issues, just like many other human beings. Maybe that’s the point. Castillo is simply asking us to see him not as an immigrant, but simply as a human brother.I would not have read this book but for its mention as an authentic immigrant story told by an immigrant in a review of the recent book “American Dirt,” which has been castigated by some as an inauthentic tale by a white American cultural appropriator. I haven’t read that book, and won’t, because I very really read fiction (which is just stuff people make up), but memoirs one of my favorite genre.
Gorgeous, direct, evocative prose tells the story of a childhood and young adulthood as an undocumented immigrant, and of a family separated physically and emotionally by the US/Mexico border. Do not miss this book.
Amazing, sad, and important. This tale of immigration and a family that simply wants a better life is hard to read in parts because it’s true. No doubt we’re all familiar with the broad outlines of the undocumented experience but Castillo has captured it in an way that will make you bend your head. That he wanted to be invisible, that his mother went back to Mexico to join his father after the latter was deported, that he has survived even though it has been a painful journey all add up to a book that hits hard. A poet, his prose style is lyrical even with the subject matter, Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. I hope this will get the wide readership it deserves and I’m going to recommend it to others.
I have mixed feelings about this book. A poet, Castillo’s prose is broken into short story-like segments that jump back and forth between his childhood, his parent’s narrative, and his recent experiences with illegal immigration, diaspora, citizenship, and dysfunctional family dynamics.There was a certain strength in this book, that I believe warrant the three stars, but first, what bothered me personally:While Castillo has some lovely prose throughout and likes to wax poetically in his memoirs, I also struggled to not roll my eyes at some of his philosophies, such as repeatedly ruminating on the abstract concept of constructed borders and the separations he has experienced all his life and how unknowable borders were while flying above them in an airplane, to then throw in a line about looking out the airplane window, noting the terrain, and knowing he had crossed into a different country. “Ach,” you may scoff at me, “That’s the beauty and irony of his prose.” Perhaps. But when reading it, it didn’t feel intentional, and I didn’t get a similar feel from the rest of his prose, so it didn’t work for me personally.My biggest struggle, probably, is that I felt like Castillo exists to be the victim. While his life has clearly been a struggle, and as an American, I fully acknowledge the incredibly dehumanizing and unfair way in which this country handles undocumented citizens, Castillo also comes across to me as someone who would claim himself a victim of circumstance regardless of his situation.There are many instances, particularly in the beginning, where he emphasizes that everything has been done to him. Always, it is what has been done to him. Throughout the entire text, there is very little about what he has done to himself (alcoholism, attitude, etc).In terms of his undocumented status in America, he recounts many impressions of his lack of existence, but rarely gives solid examples of this. He mentions some details in passing about his navigation of society while living in such a tenuous state, but rarely delves into the actual details of if. He writes about his experience and America with a sort of hate, or at least resentment of its treatment of him, and I couldn’t help but wonder why he was even staying in America in the first place. In thinking back, in all his snippets describing the journey of his parents into America as illegal immigrants, he never seems to acknowledge their role in his position. Entering illegally, the parents knowingly put their children in this position of existing-but-not-existing; it may have been to give them a chance at a better future, but it was still a decision of knowingly placing this burden on your children, by entering illegally. (In my understanding, theirs was not a decision based on need, more of desire.) While I don’t condone America’s current policies, it is also frustrating to read passages of victimization while only acknowledging the wrongs of one party responsible in a two-guilty-parties scenario; it is a complicated arrangement of guilt, moralities, etc., but this book felt very narrow in its treatment of the issue.This is not to say that I think immigrants should be treated poorly, or that their children should be put in such difficult positions, or that Castillo himself can’t naturally side with his family and their position, but it all played into the mentality of victimhood that my opinion on Castillo and his narrative voice was a bit soured.If this book, as you may deduce from the above, isn’t much about his actual personal experiences, what is it about? In reality, it’s mostly about his complicated relationship with his father, before and after the father was deported and separated from the family for over a decade.Castillo’s treatment of his father is as messy and complicated as his own feelings for him seems to be. His father, by Castillo’s account, is not the best of men. He is an abusive narcissist, and his separation seems to be treated as both a tragedy and a blessing. This is another complicated aspect of Castillo’s narrative: his is a story about a family “torn apart” by the deportation of his father. But there is very little addressed about this; it almost seems like the separation was the best thing for all involved, and his father seems to have been happy to be in Mexico, except for his restriction from seeing his wife or living with his wife. Again, though, the tragedy is minimized by the impression that that was the best for everyone. (He has several siblings, by the way, but you’d barely know it from the text.)Castillo repeatedly returns to describing his father and their complicated relationship. It really is the primary focus of the book. But it is neither Castillo nor his father that are truly what makes this book worth something; what does is the women in his life: his mother, and his wife.While Castillo’s wife gets relatively little treatment aside from detailing her company on much of his journey trying to get citizenship and immigration rights dealt with for his parents, she is an obvious strength in the background, and I believe she deserves more credit that she is really given in his text.What really makes this memoir worth the read, though, is Castillo’s mother. Castillo’s mother is a complicated character but is ultimately one impossible to not root for. For all the time Castillo takes to leave poetic impressions on himself and his father and their complicated relationship with America, it is the impressions left of the women in his life that will stick with me long after the rest of the book has faded from memory.Thank you to Harper for providing an ARC for review purposes.
This is a beautifully written but heartbreaking memoir–one of the best immigrant books I’ve read.
A moving and heartbreaking memoir. Do yourself a favor, skip American Dirt and read a real take on the modern immigrant struggle. |
7 reviews