American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
The president and publisher of Flatiron Books, which published the controversial American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, has issued a statement on the book’s rollout and his company’s “inadequacies” in addressing issues of representation. The statement also announced that the rest of the author’s planned 40-city book tour has been canceled.
Since its release last week, the book has continued to generate outrage from members of the Latinx community and the #ownvoices movement about race, identity, Cummins’ depiction of Mexican migrants, and her right in the first place to write about the plight of marginalized communities.
“The discussion around this book has exposed deep inadequacies in how we at Flatiron Books address issues of representation, both in the books we publish and in the teams that work on them,” said Flatiron President and Publisher Bob Miller in the statement. “We are committed to finding new ways to address these issues and the specific publishing choices underlying this publication, and feel an obligation to our colleagues, readers, and authors alike.”
“We made serious mistakes in the way we rolled out this book. We should never have claimed that it was a novel that defined the migrant experience; we should not have said that Jeanine’s husband was an undocumented immigrant while not specifying that he was from Ireland; we should not have had a centerpiece at our bookseller dinner last May that replicated the book jacket so tastelessly. We can now see how insensitive those and other decisions were, and we regret them.”
Miller cited “concerns about safety” as leading to the decision to cancel the book tour. “Based on specific threats to booksellers and the author, we believe there exists real peril to their safety,” he noted in the statement.
Miller outlined a new course the company will take in an effort to tackle the issues head-on: “Rather than run away from this conversation, we want to move towards a solution. For that reason, we will be organizing a series of town hall meetings, where Jeanine will be joined by some of the groups who have raised objections to the book. We believe that this provides an opportunity to come together and unearth difficult truths to help us move forward as a community.”
In the statement, Miller said that prior to the controversy, the book was creating more excitement and anticipation than any book he could recall during his 40 years in publishing.
“We were therefore surprised by the anger that has emerged from members of the Latinx and publishing communities,” he said. “The fact that we were surprised is indicative of a problem, which is that in positioning this novel, we failed to acknowledge our own limits.”
He pointed out, “Jeanine Cummins spent five years of her life writing this book with the intent to shine a spotlight on tragedies facing immigrants. For that reason, it’s unfortunate that she is the recipient of hatred from the very communities she sought to honor.”
The novel tells the story of Lydia, who lives in Acapulco and runs a bookstore. When the charming and intelligent Javier enters her shop, she is unaware he is the leader of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia’s husband’s tell-all profile of Javier is published, their lives will never be the same.
Forced to flee, Lydia and her son find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, they make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier’s reach doesn’t extend. As they join countless people trying to reach the U.S., Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something.
This story is an update on an earlier BookTrib report, which can be found here.
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