The ‘American Dirt' Backlash Nearly Stopped Jeanine Cummins From Writing

New York Times

14-05-2025

By most measures, Jeanine Cummins's 2020 novel 'American Dirt' was a colossal success. A propulsive story about a Mexican mother and son who flee to the United States to escape a drug cartel, the novel sold for seven figures. It was an Oprah book club pick, won endorsements from best-selling authors like Stephen King and John Grisham, and became a runaway hit, selling more than four million copies in nearly 40 languages.
In other ways, though, 'American Dirt' was a disaster. Cummins, who grew up in Maryland and is of Irish and Puerto Rican descent, was widely condemned for what some claimed was an insensitive and clichéd depiction of Mexican migrants. To critics of the book, she became the embodiment of the publishing industry's racial blind spots, and the main character in a caustic debate about whether, and how, authors should write outside of their own cultural experience.
Cummins thought her career was over. She wasn't sure if she'd be able to write again, or if she even wanted to. But a few years ago, the idea for a new novel started to take shape — a story that grew out of the experience of having her cultural identity debated.
'In the aftermath of publishing 'American Dirt,' I was doing a lot of soul searching and self-reflection on how did I get here, how did this happen?' Cummins said during an interview at the public library near her home in Rockland County, N.Y. 'So I started thinking a lot about my own identity, which I'd been thinking about my entire life privately, but had never had to grapple with publicly before.'
Those questions led Cummins to trace her roots in Puerto Rico, which fed into her new novel, 'Speak to Me of Home.' The narrative follows a family's turbulent history across several generations. Rafaela Acuña y Daubón, who is based on Cummins's grandmother, moves from San Juan to Trinidad to work on a U.S. naval base as a secretary — a job she's forced to take after her father's business collapses and the family's wealth evaporates. She meets a handsome Irish American man and marries him, despite his father's bigoted objections to her background.
They move to St. Louis, where Rafaela feels isolated and presses their children to assimilate, hoping to protect them from the discrimination she faces. Rafaela's daughter, Ruth, feels cut off from her Puerto Rican roots, until her own daughter, Daisy, moves to San Juan and discovers a momentous family secret.
Much of the narrative was mined from Cummins's own family, she said. When her paternal grandmother Maria was still a teenager, her family lost its fortune and sent her to work on a naval base in Trinidad, where she met Cummins's Irish American grandfather and eventually married him and moved to St. Louis.
While interviewing relatives to research the novel, Cummins learned that her grandfather's family had objected to him marrying a Puerto Rican woman, and that Maria, who thought of herself as upper class, was shocked to encounter pervasive racism in Missouri. In incidents that Cummins repurposed in the novel, Maria was forbidden from using the ladies' locker room at a country club, and urged her children not to identify as Puerto Rican.
Cummins's father, who died in 2016, grew up traveling between St. Louis and Puerto Rico, but he rarely brought up his Puerto Rican heritage, she said. Growing up, she knew more about her roots in Ireland, where she lived for two years after college, bartending and writing poetry. Her first two novels, 'The Outside Boy' and 'The Crooked Branch,' were works of historical fiction set in Ireland.
With 'American Dirt,' which drew early comparisons to 'The Grapes of Wrath,' Cummins seemed poised to break out. But pretty quickly, the hype was drowned out by those who argued the novel was full of harmful stereotypes about Mexico, depicting it as a violent, corrupt country overrun by drug cartels.
Others seized on Cummins's author's note, in which she said she hoped to counter misconceptions about migrants as a 'helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass,' and that she wished that someone 'slightly browner than me' had written the novel.
When Winfrey announced 'American Dirt' as her book club selection, the backlash was swift. A group of 141 authors signed an open letter asking Winfrey to drop the novel, which they said was 'exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed, too often erring on the side of trauma fetishization.'
Winfrey decided to highlight the debate. Instead of the usual format, Cummins was brought on to discuss the book alongside three Latina writers — Julissa Arce, Esther Cepeda and Reyna Grande — who were critical of the novel.
'I wasn't able to respond in that moment — there was nothing I could say,' Cummins said. 'I wasn't able to defend myself.'
She recalls feeling like a magnet for people's pent-up frustrations. 'I was sort of the lit match to dry kindling,' she said. 'It was incredibly disconcerting that I was the person who became the example of the white supremacy problem in publishing, as a part Puerto Rican woman from a working-class background.'
She was particularly stung when people who had initially supported the book withdrew their endorsements, 'in ways that did not feel genuine, that were entire self-serving and dare I say cowardly,' she said.
In hindsight, Cummins acknowledges some positive outcomes from the controversy, which brought attention to how the book business often fails to promote works by writers of color, while heaping money and acclaim on white authors.
'The conversation that did happen around 'American Dirt' was long overdue, though I would have preferred not have been in the cross hairs of it,' Cummins said.
Cummins said she does not regret writing 'American Dirt,' though she wishes the debate about the novel had centered on the humanitarian crisis at the border. Still, she was unable to write for a year after the controversy. Once she began, she was terrified of the scrutiny she might face and had a couple of false starts, she said.
'She was trying to find her sea legs,' said the novelist and bookseller Ann Patchett, who was among the prominent fans of 'American Dirt' and was steadfast in her praise of the book as the backlash built.
When she read 'Speak to Me of Home,' Patchett said she was struck by how Cummins navigated questions about cultural identity and belonging, some of the same issues that became a flashpoint with 'American Dirt.'
'She found a way to make art out of her experience, but she made it into something loving instead of something full of rage,' she said.
'Speak to Me of Home' has drawn mixed pre-publication reviews. Publishers Weekly called it 'engrossing'; Kirkus Reviews said Cummins was 'more nuanced' in her treatment of issues like colorism and class, but argued that she 'still indulges in tired tropes.' Holt released the novel on May 13.
Pamela Klinger-Horn, the events coordinator at Valley Bookseller in Stillwater, Minn., said she saw no signs that readers were put off by the 'American Dirt' controversy.
'What I've heard from readers is that they liked 'American Dirt' and they're excited to read something new by her,' she said.
At Bethany Beach Books in Delaware, pre-orders for Cummins's new novel have been strong, and the store has sold more than 70 tickets for an upcoming event for the book, said Zandria Senft, the store's manager.
'A lot of people want to support her and hear her speak about her new book,' Senft said. 'It's so refreshing that she didn't back down and that she put herself back out into the world.'
The reaction Cummins cared about the most was from her own extended family and her relatives in Puerto Rico, she said.
'Because this was dicey and a lot of it comes from our family history and it covers a lot of themes that we don't talk about in my family, I wasn't sure how they were going to feel about it,' she said.
Cummins sent copies to her father's siblings and cousins and their children, and recently the family gathered over Zoom to discuss the book. To her relief, their reactions were positive, and the conversation later turned to her cousin Carolina Quixano's recent appearance on 'The Bachelor.'
Cummins is now restarting her public life as an author, after a five-year hiatus, and is preparing for an eight-city book tour. While she doesn't relish rehashing the debate over 'American Dirt,' she finally feels able to talk about it.
'It's not my favorite subject,' she said. 'But I'm not afraid of it.'