Hello dear Readers,
Below my book review of Children of the Land: A Memoir by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.
Title: Children of the Land: A Memoir
Rating: 5/5 Stars
Genre: Memoir
Author: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: January 28, 2020
Publication Date: January 28, 2020
Language: English
Book Description
An Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub 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.
My Thoughts
In this moment in time, I am so proud and glad there are so many Latino writers out there sharing their stories, being vulnerable and knowing that, even if afraid, they share these stories with the world anyway.
Memoir is a genre I love. I devour these books, and as I writer serves my as one more way to inspire me and keep going with my own writing. Lately, I have been more inclined to read memoirs on border stories, undocumented immigrants, because I think it is important to read it from the people that actually goes through it than just assume or believe what the media or other people want us to believe. I don't want to generalize, and most important, these stories teach me that our writing has to have purpose.
Reading Marcelo's story was hard because, unconsciously, you can't help but think, how can he, anybody go through so much. How these type of situations happen?. But then I remember, that is the whole purpose of him sharing his story, at least for me as a reader, to understand, to hear it from the true source, if you will.
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