Some thoughts about American Dirt, cultural appropriation and fact versus fiction

Several decades ago when I was the high school English department chair at a suburban Washington school, teachers were using a well-regarded Chicano novel called Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya.  The main character is a six-year old boy living with his family in New Mexico, and the story revolves around the visit of his grandmother, a curandera, whose herbal cures and kind acts contrast with the town’s fire and brimstone priest. A student’s parents came in to protest the use of the novel, feeling that it wrongly depicted Catholicism; they did not want non-Catholic students to think this was The Church.   They wanted us to bring in their priest to speak to students to dispel the incorrect portrayal of the novel.

I am reminded of this incident as I read the articles about the criticism directed towards Jeanine Cummins and her novel American Dirt (“’American Dirt’ critics are censoring the author based on her genetic background”, Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post, January 31, 2020). She has been accused of cultural appropriation and of “getting it wrong.”  I haven’t read the book (yet) and so cannot comment on the veracity of her portrayal of Mexican immigrants, but I feel that – as with the personal incident I reference - critics are leaving out an important aspect, the readers.  In my personal experience, the school’s response to the parents was that one, it’s a novel, and doesn’t pretend to represent reality, but instead show a slice of it in this narrow context.  Second, one of the jobs of the teacher is to help readers be discerning, to understand that this is a story and that characters such as the priest serve a larger theme in the book.  Good readers understand that a novel is fictional.  I suspect that anyone who buys and reads American Dirt is not a casual reader, but someone who reads regularly and who has a frame of reference for current events beyond a novel.  The critics short-change us when they do not give readers credit for being able to understand the limitations of a novel and to understand that it is a story with characters who do not stand in as representatives of their entire race.