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Biography & Autobiography. History. Multi-Cultural. Nonfiction. HTML: An Entertainment Weekly Most Anticipated Book of 2020 This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man's attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. "You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story." When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary. With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family's encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father's deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother's heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor. Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen..… (more)
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He does an excellent job of explaining the anxiety, stress, and fear he was raised with. He saw his father deported. Even after he gets a green card after marriage, the anxiety is still there. The fear of border patrol, of showing his documents--it's always there.
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My only disagreement is that on page 117 he writes "I took for granted how much growing up in California quietly consoled me just by being in the presence of people like me. But in the frigid Michigan snow, in its humid summers, in small corn-fed towns that I'm sure meant well when their people asked me 'So what are you?' I had to recalibrate who I was to those around me." He then goes on to explain they had to hide the identities of their culture, and how after two years it was exhausting. I understand why he assumed this was because he (and his wife) are Latinx. But it happens to lots and lots of people, including those who in California are largely considered boring white people--Midwesterners (especially small town Midwetserners) question anyone who does not have an English/German/ Scandinavian surname, and who has dark hair and even pale olive skin. It happened to me many times in 4 years in Wisconsin. It very much IS exhausting and it DOES make you feel very unwelcome and excluded.
This is a solid memoir about the immigrant experience. Castillo was five years old, when he crossed the border with his family. For the next 2 decades, it becomes a story of survival. Tales of deportation and displacement, a family, struggling to find footing in America, against draconian policies. The writing is good but could have used a little editing. Castillo is also a poet, so I would like to sample some of his poetry.