American Dirt Controversy Brings Publishing’s Diversity Problem to Light
On December 12, 2019, literary critic Myriam Gurba published an incisive review of the highly-anticipated novel American Dirt on the academic blog Tropics of Meta. Written by Jeanine Cummins and published by Flatiron Books in January 2020, American Dirt follows the journey of Mexican bookseller Lydia Perez and her son as they flee to the US on a freight train with a drug cartel on their heels. Gurba’s article, titled “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck,” criticized Cummins for adhering to the “great American tradition” of appropriating works by people of colour (POC) for “mass racially ‘colorblind’ consumption.”
Gurba’s article circulated social media as others shared their thoughts on Cummins’ misappropriation of the Mexican immigrant experience. The controversy snowballed as Twitter users uncovered photos Cummins had shared earlier in the year: barbed-wire nail art Cummins had commissioned based on the cover art of her book and barbed-wire centerpieces at a Flatiron luncheon thrown for Cummins in May 2019. The aestheticization of the barbed wire motif made a gruesome metaphor for Cummins’ reduction of Mexican and other Latinx immigrants’ lives to racist tropes.
Cummins self-identified as white in a 2015 essay but inexplicably branded herself as Latinx when she began promoting American Dirt in 2019. Cummins also lamented her husband’s status as an undocumented migrant in interviews, but commentators pointed out that her husband is Irish, not Mexican, and that Cummins’ references to him seemed like a disingenuous attempt to connect herself to the plight of undocumented Mexican migrants.
In a note at the beginning of American Dirt, publisher Amy Einhorn wrote of Cummins’ declaration that “migrants at the Mexican border were being portrayed as a ‘faceless brown mass.’ [Cummins] wanted to give these people a face.” In the afterword, Cummins expresses wishes that “someone slightly browner than [herself] had written it.” According to critics, Cummins and Einhorn steamrolled over the issue at hand: racialized writers with the experiences and knowledge to write authentic stories about immigration and Latin America exist. And these writers have been doing it even without institutional support from publishers like Flatiron and the backing of public figures like Stephen King and Oprah — both of which American Dirt received.
Flatiron cancelled the American Dirt book tour in January 2020. But Barnes & Nobles and Indigo store windows across North America still display the book, while its critics, like Gurba, have received multiple death threats. American Dirt amplified dissent about the publishing industry’s diversity problem. A survey study by Lee & Low Books in 2015 revealed that white people composed 79% of the publishing industry. Lee & Low’s 2019 study reported that the number that dropped to 76% but that the 3% difference was not statistically significant: “... the field is just as white as it was four years ago.”
“But it’s not just a matter of hiring more Latinx people or [other] marginalized groups,” said Dr. Ellen Berrey, a University of Toronto sociologist and the author of The Enigma of Diversity. “Publishing houses need to [change] their internal processes and [have] policies that reflect common patterns of how we know racism and other forms of oppression get reproduced.”
“The debacle of American Dirt happens because you don't lift up POC voices; you find tokens that satiate your appetite for our suffering,” tweeted John Manuel Arias, a Costa Rican and Uruguayan writer. Other Latinx writers such as investigative journalist Robert Lopez and horror author Cina Pelayo echoed that sentiment, tweeting mock pitches for books about Latinx issues based on their lived experiences.
Myriam Gurba shared their tweets, saying, “Hey [Flatiron Books] you asked us to bring you talent. The talent is ready and waiting.”
