Fiction

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/american-dirt-book_n_5e2a11e8c5b6779e9c2fd79f

'American Dirt' Isn't Just Bad — Its Best Parts Are Cribbed From Latino Writers

Plenty of authors have written authentic accounts of Mexico. But they weren't Oprah's Book Club pick.

By
David J. Schmidt
Jan 24, 2020, 02:07 PM EST
|Updated Feb 6, 2020

When I first read a scene about a young boy being crushed to death by a garbage truck in the new novel “American Dirt,” it made me queasy. Not because of its graphic depiction, or because the author, Jeanine Cummins, is not from Mexico, where the novel is set. What bothered me was the deja vu.

I had read this scene before, in Luis Alberto Urrea’s “By the Lake of Sleeping Children,” a nonfiction book that draws from Urrea’s years of humanitarian relief work in the most marginal communities of Tijuana.

…

Cummins is not a person familiar with Mexico. She describes an imaginary country where people put sour cream on their street tacos, dress their chicken with BBQ sauce rather than mole, eat black licorice drops rather than mazapán, and fear the Bogeyman rather than El Coco. “American Dirt” is also riddled with linguistic gaffes, including a character thinking of her own mother as abuela (grandma).

…more…

(This controversy reminds me of the white teacher Rachel Dolezal and her claim she ‘felt’ black…. Discussion of plagiarism claims, cultural appropriation, really bad editing, etc….?)