American Dirt Study Guide

Jeanine Cummins was born on December 6, 1974, in Rota, Spain, when her father was stationed there with the United States Navy. Her mom was a nurse. She was raised in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and studied English and Communications at nearby Towson University. Cummins’s grandmother was from Puerto Rico, and she has both Puerto Rican and Irish heritage. She lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for two years, and worked as a bartender before returning to the United States in 1997. Cummins spent 10 years in New York City working in publishing, including for Penguin. She is currently married to an Irish immigrant who lived illegally in the United States for nearly a decade, and they have two daughters. Cummins’s first book, a memoir entitled A Rip in Heaven, was published in 2004. It recounts the story of the violent attack on her brother and two cousins in St. Louis, which culminated in her cousins’ murders. Cummins was 16 years old at the time and has said she was inspired to become a writer after the tragedy. One of the victims, Cummins’s cousin Julie, also aspired to write, and Cummins felt she owed it to Julie to carry the torch in her absence. Cummins later published three novels. The Outside Boy (2010) and The Crooked Branch (2013) both delve into aspects of Irish History. American Dirt (2020) is Cummins’s most famous work. Prior to its publication, Oprah selected American Dirt for her book club list. Soon after its release, however, controversy erupted as critics denounced claims regarding the book’s relevance to contemporary conversations around clandestine migration. As a result, Cummins’s year-long book tour was cancelled shortly before it was set to begin. Nevertheless, American Dirt debuted at #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list, and it stayed at #1 for 36 weeks. Cummins has suggested that her next book will once again focus on social justice issues and what she considers the “largely misunderstood” story of Puerto Rico.

American Dirt explores the plight of clandestine migrants through the story of a middle-class family forced to flee Mexico in the aftermath of cartel violence,. Cummins has stated that, in writing the book, she wished to alter public opinion by depicting migrants in a more sympathetic light. The novel was published towards the end of Donald Trump’s presidency (2016–2020), at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment was at an all-time high and the United States had enacted extremely harsh immigration policies. Border security was a predominant issue during the 2016 presidential election debates, and the expansion of the existing border wall between the United States and Mexico was a major focal point of discussions. Support for the wall was bolstered by racist and harmful rhetoric that not only exaggerated the dangers posed by undocumented immigrants but also dehumanized them. In fact, American Dirt references Trump’s particular use of the phrase “bad hombres” to refer negatively to undocumented immigrants and prop up support for his presidential campaign, which leaned heavily into the need to expand the wall. At the same time, horrifying images of migrant detention centers flooded media outlets, including photos of children who had been separated from their parents and were being kept in cages. These images beckoned the American public to take a real interest in the human rights abuses occurring at the border. The COVID-19 pandemic, which began mere months after American Dirt’s release, soon exacerbated the already poor conditions in detention centers and drew even more public attention to the plight of clandestine migrants. In the wake of the pandemic, immigration reform remains a prominent issue in American electoral politics, with human rights activists pushing for meaningful policy change.

In addition to American Dirt, Cummins has written three books, including A Rip in Heaven, a memoir that follows her family’s heartbreaking journey through the aftermath of violent crime. In it, Cummins explores themes similar to those featured in American Dirt, including trauma and grief. In preparation for writing American Dirt, Cummins heavily researched clandestine migration and studied works written by contemporary Mexican and Mexican American authors, especially Luis Alberto Urrea. His book, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, is a work of nonfiction that follows a group of men who attempted to cross the border in Arizona through a dangerous stretch known as the Devil’s Highway. Author Reyna Grande came to the United States from Mexico at nine years old as an undocumented immigrant. Her novel Across a Hundred Mountains, which won the American Book Award in 2006, follows a young girl as she tries to reunite with her father working in America in the wake of tragedy. Mexican author Valeria Luiselli worked for a year as a translator for immigration services in New York and has written extensively about migration. Her novel, Lost Children Archive, sheds light on the plight of Mexican and Central American children seeking asylum in the United States.