American Dirt: Cultural Appropriation and the Publishing Industry

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins was released in January 2020 and was anointed the biggest book of the season well before it came out. The novel tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, fleeing their home in Acapulco, Mexico, for the US after their family was murdered by a drug cartel. It received amazing blurbs from authors like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Sandra Cisneros. It all seemed to be going fine, until it wasn’t. Critics started to bring up one major problem within the book; it was a book about Mexican migrants written by a white American author.

Not only had Cummins written a story that was not hers, but she also fetishized the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings.  On social media, people started to deem the book as “stereotypical” and “appropriative,” with some even calling it trauma porn. Flatiron Books decided to cancel Cummins’s book tour, citing threats to both the author and booksellers. This controversy added fuel to the ongoing debate about who can tell what stories. 

The question surrounding the debate is “is it empathy or exploitation?” Did Cummins write American Dirt because she empathized with a group of people and wanted to uplift their voices, or did she want to exploit their traumatic experiences?