Three years ago, “American Dirt” was published by Flatiron Books. You would think it would have been remembered for the vast amount of high praise it received — even being listed as a pick for Oprah’s book club — or for its record-breaking sales numbers of over 500,000 copies sold in its first print run, but that’s not what comes to mind when its name is mentioned.
What follows this book is the outrage it caused, specifically in the Latinx community, for its use of harmful stereotypes and negative rhetoric addressing the life of migrants, more specifically Mexican migrants. And it doesn’t help that it was written by a white woman who has no ties to the community whatsoever. When asked, the author now mentions a Puerto Rican grandmother. But, that doesn’t help her case in the slightest because it just shows that to people like her, our stories are interchangeable regardless of the Latinx country we come from when that can not be farther from the truth.
The book tells the story of a mother and her son as they flee Mexico and journey to the United States after their family was murdered by the drug cartel. How original.
Backlash is nothing new in the world of publishing. Books are going to receive good and/or bad criticism whether they are well-liked or not — that’s a fact. But that isn’t where the problem lies in this current situation: it’s the op-ed written three years after the fact published in the New York Times earlier last week.
I won’t even dignify mentioning the author’s name because I frankly don’t care for their opinion on the matter. All you need to know is that, yes, it is a white woman defending another white woman.
While the opinion piece is hidden behind a pay wall, a book influencer who goes by the name “Tomes and Textiles” has been kind enough to post the article on Twitter through screenshots. You can read it here, but I’ll save you the trouble. The article goes on about the controversy being a “witch hunt” and that the outrage was an attempt at “censorship.”
I wish they wouldn’t waste their energy in trying to make people feel bad for a white woman who made a substantial amount of money at the expense of a community she is not a part of and even received accolades for her work. I don’t care that she cried because her book tour was canceled, she made an insane amount of money and rich people liked her work — she’ll be just fine.
As a Latina woman and daughter of immigrant parents, I am tired of white authors trying to relate to and benefit from the trauma that we carry for the sake of making themselves stand out as a writer. You have these stories elevated to such popularity being told by people who don’t look like the characters they are writing, and actual Latinx authors are brushed aside for telling stories like these the right way.
The article’s publication reignited the spark in the conversation and brings up a very good question: who gets to write what?
I think back to a fiction writing class I took two years ago where we were to ask ourselves the questions “Who is allowed to write what?” and “As an author, what do you owe your reader?”
As a Latina woman majoring in English and Creative Writing, I find myself in a largely white space. And as someone who is a writer, I personally like to write about what I know. But that is the difference between me and a lot of my peers. I have to think about the amount of space I take up, and they don’t.
They never had to think about that sort of thing because they were taught the world was theirs; they are allowed to take it without thinking about the consequences. As an author, I believe that you owe your readers authenticity. While writing is imaginative, it holds truth, and by sharing a truth that is not yours, you risk hurting the people you feel compelled to write about.
This is a question that has been asked for years before this controversy, and this spectacle is not singular. I doubt this will be the last time something like this happens, but I know that it can be avoided by simply asking yourself, “Do I get to be the person to write this?”