Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (2 of 3)
/Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (2 of 3)
Olivia González
Silencing, Censorship, and Identity “Policing”?: Interrogating Cummins’ Concerns
Like several of her supporters, Cummins has suggested that identity politics, silencing, and censorship are responsible for the backlash that American Dirt has received. For example, Cummins has maligned critiques of American Dirt that are centered upon her identity, claiming that while she is a privileged, white, U.S. citizen, “I am also Puerto Rican” and “that fact has been attacked and sidelined by people who, frankly, are attempting to police my identity” (Martin, 2020). Additionally, Cummins has expressed concerns over cultural appropriation conversations that go “too far toward silencing people” (Alter, 2020, para. 17–18), and suggested that“telling people what stories they are allowed to write” is a “dangerous sort of slippery fascist slope” (Conroy, 2020).However, through engaging with Chicana feminist scholarship, I argue that these claims are not only unfounded but also—communicated from Cummins’ now substantial platform—mislead the public about which writers are prevented from telling their own stories. As work by Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Aída Hurtado reveals—contrary to claims about contemporary “cancel culture”—efforts to silence and censor storytelling are not new phenomena, and it is women of color whose stories and storytelling have consistently been silenced and censored, and for whom writing is a powerful tool in the pursuit of liberation.
While first created in considerably different social and political contexts, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1981) widely acclaimed anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (hereafter referred to as Bridge) embodies a powerful work through which the controversy surrounding American Dirt can be productively read. As discussed and demonstrated in Bridge, writing can play a powerful role in mujeres of color’s development and expression of a feminist politic that is shaped by their embodied experiences. Specifically, as Moraga (2015) suggests, Bridge presents U.S. women of color’s “theory in the flesh”—a politic formed through exploring, recording, and honoring their complex, even contradictory, lived experiences as women at the “crossroads” of multiple, intersecting identities (p. xxii). And according to Moraga (2015), it is through writing about these experiences—“telling our stories in our own words” (p. 19)—that women of color can “bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true” and pursue the liberatory potential of their “theory incarnate” (p. xxiv). Thus, as Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983) discuss in the anthology’s second edition, Bridge—comprised of art, essays, poems, and other writings by women of color—contains “non-rhetorical, highly personal chronicles that present a political analysis in everyday terms" (p.xxiv).
Similarly, in her text Intersectional Chicana Feminisms, Aída Hurtado (2020) asserts that Chicanas “use writing as the most powerful weapon at their disposal to voice their feminisms, to fight injustice” (p. 93). And as discussed and demonstrated in Bridge, Hurtado (2020) affirms that this writing can take many forms, voices, and tongues. According to Hurtado (2020), Chicana feminist writers insist that “we use everything,” from poetry to social science, “whatever it takes to voice a reality that has never been properly addressed” (p. 59). Additionally, Hurtado (2020) cites Chicana poet Elba Sánchez, who claims that her tongue is “‘a gift, my power,’” through which she “‘names injustices I witness, a veces en voz de poeta, a veces en mi native lengua pocha, from my pocha perspective’” (p. 93).
Moreover, in her work “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” Anzaldúa (1983) claims that writing is a mechanism through which mujeres de color “reclaim” their voices and tongues, and negotiate their survival and selfhood. In particular, according to both Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983), Third World women—a term used by U.S. women of color to “align ourselves with countries bearing colonial histories and still suffering their effects” (Moraga, 2015, p. xxv)—"wield a pen as a tool, a weapon, a means of survival, a magic wand that will attract power, that will draw self-love into our bodies” (p. 163). Thus, Anzaldúa (1983) shares that she herself writes to “record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you…To discover myself, to preserve myself, to achieve autonomy” (p. 169).
However, Anzaldúa (1983) also emphasizes that mujeres of color must contend with mechanisms that silence them and delegitimize their voices and tongues, revealing that the difficulties and “dangers we face as women writers of color are not the same as those of white women” (p. 165). For example, through her work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa (1987) decries the “tradition of silence” that suppresses her many voices as a queer Chicana: “my voice: Indian, Spanish, white” and “my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice” (p. 59). Additionally, Anzaldúa (1987) describes the burdens of translation that she endures when speaking in her “‘home’ tongues,” such as “Standard Mexican Spanish” and “Spanglish” (p. 56)—a process that renders her multilingual tongue “illegitimate” (p. 59).
Drawing from these works, and examining the sociocultural and political contexts in which American Dirtwas authored and acclaimed, I argue that identity “policing” and “cancel culture” are not the driving forces behind the novel’s negative reception. Instead, I posit that American Dirt must be critiqued through a politics of authorship that is guided by three critical questions: For whom are stories about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands political and personal? For whom is embodying a cultural bridge a mechanism of oppression and liberation? And for whom are borderlands stories profitable?
For whom are stories about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands political and personal?
Despite its engagement with topics bearing highly politicized tenor in current U.S. discourses—including the “norteño president” and his rhetoric about “bad hombres” (Cummins, 2020, p. 235)—many reviewers have characterized American Dirt as apolitical. Some have criticized American Dirt for being “determinedly apolitical,” decrying Cummins’ failure to address the political factors fueling the “forced migrations ” she depicts (Sehgal, 2020, para. 15), and her attempts to separate “‘policy issues’” from “‘moral and humanitarian concerns’” (Arce, 2020). However, other reviewers, such as John Grisham (n.d.), have praised American Dirt for being apolitical, applauding that “its message is important and timely, but not political.” Similarly, some positive reviews of American Dirt have alluded to the novel’s political implications while refraining from labeling it a political piece. For example, Sarah Blake (n.d.) claimed the book is “urgent and unforgettable, [it] leaps the borders of the page and demands attention, especially now,” while Stephen King (n.d.) deemed American Dirt “an important voice in the discussion about immigration and los migrantes… put[ing] the lie to the idea that we are being besieged by ‘bad hombres.’”
I argue that reviews praising American Dirt as an apolitical work highlight the privileged position from which Cummins wrote—and was read and reviewed—compared to mujeres of color writing about and from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Specifically, through juxtaposing responses to American Dirt with responses to recent writing by Chicana and Mexicana authors, and drawing from Moraga (1983; 2015), Anzaldúa (1983; 1987),Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983), and Hurtado’s (2020) claims about both the power and difficulties that women writers of color navigate, I highlight the distance from which Cummins authored American Dirt, and the dangers posed by the novel’s positive reception as an “apolitical” piece.
For example, like American Dirt, Mexican immigrant writer Valeria Luiselli’s (2019) Lost Children Archive—a novel tracing a woman’s journey as she embarks on a road trip from New York to Arizona with her family and documents the child refugee crisis along the southern U.S border—explores issues tied to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through a fictional narrative. However, unlike American Dirt, Lost Children Archive was substantially shaped by Luiselli’s personal experiences, including Luiselli’s own road trip from New York to Arizona with her family, and her work as an interpreter for child migrants in federal immigration court (Wood, 2019). And in further contrast with American Dirt, Luiselli’s work has been repeatedly deemed “political.” In particular, reviewers have called Lost Children Archive a work that “drifts almost dreamlike between the personal and political” (Greenblatt, n.d.), is “both personal and global, familial and political” (McGinty, n.d.), and is “political without being propagandistic” (Malone, n.d.).
While Lost Children Archive does address the political forces fueling the injustices it depicts, these reviews highlight that even as a work of fiction, Lost Children Archive is a powerful reminder that for women writers of color, “the political is profoundly personal” (Moraga, 2015, p. xxi). Juxtaposing these reviews with those celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” thus illustrates the privileged distance from which Cummins wrote her work, including her limited personal stakes in the discourses and policies shaping the lives of the migrants she aimed to portray. Thus, I argue that praising American Dirt as “apolitical” does more than address Cummins’ lack of engagement with policies or partisan politics; this label reveals—and rewards—Cummins’ distance from the subjects of her story.
Further, like Lost Children Archive, Myriam Gurba’s critique of American Dirt was intimately shaped by her personal experiences, and received responses that deviated substantially from American Dirt. Throughout her review, Gurba grounds her critiques of the novelin her personal experiences and affective responses as a Chicana “living en el Norte.”Forexample, Gurba compares Cummins to a college roommate who wore Gurba’s clothes as an “ill-fitting Mexican costume,” and describes her visceral reactions to Cummins’ reported efforts to give a face to the “‘faceless brown mass’” at the southern border, which “pissed me off so bad my blood became carbonated.” While Gurba has been praised by many readers for her incisive and personal writing, others have criticized the personal nature, as well as the language and tone, of her critique.
For example, as Gurba shares in the opening of her work, she originally wrote her review of American Dirt at the request of Ms., a feminist magazine.However, Ms. later denied Gurba (2019) the opportunity to publish her finished critique, as its editors suggested that she “lacked the fame to pen something so ‘negative.’” Gurba subsequently published her review online via the academic blog Tropics of Meta, where several readers similarly critiqued Gurba’s tone, as well as her use of language and personal stories. For example, readers suggested that Gurba was
“negative,” “mean,” “vulgar,” and “whin[y].” As one reader stated, Gurba is “mean y harsh,” and her writing is “an over-worked exercise in meanness,” and “pierde fuerza in being so vehemente, y sobre todo in being so vulgar” (Moreno, 2019).
Some readers also criticized Gurba’s use of Spanglish in her review, asserting that it was unimpressive, “poorly-used” (Pablo, 2020), and that “Spanglish es solo un inglés malo y un castellano peor…” (Leftbanker, 2020), Further, according to several readers, through grounding her review in her personal experiences, Gurba diminished the credibility of her arguments. As one reader claimed, the “worst” parts of Gurba’s review are “about Gurba,” and not truly “about the book” (Tyrer, 2020). And others “challenge[d]” Gurba to write a new, positive and impersonal critique: “to take yourself out of the picture…and find something, anything positive about this book from another person’s perspective” (Julia, 2020).
These responses to Gurba’s work thus illustrate the silencing, delegitimizing mechanisms and dangers with which contemporary women writers of color penning personal, multi-lingual works (Anzaldúa, 1983; 1987) must still contend. Using what some of her critics seem to suggest is her “lengua pocha” and “pocha perspective,” Gurba wields her writing as a “weapon” to fight the injustices she sees reflected in, and reproduced by, American Dirt (Hurtado, 2020, p. 93); to “rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you” (Anzaldúa, 1983, p. 169). However, in doing so, Gurba and her voice and tongue were deemed illegitimate by many readers, as well as threatened by others—Gurba received death threats in response to her piece (Grady, 2020b).
Thus, I argue that juxtaposing responses to Gurba’s review, as well as to Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, with those celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” suggests that, while Cummins has now publicly claimed her identity as a Latina, she was read and reviewed as—and held the privileges of—a white woman writer. Cummins was not only able to tell and sell a story about highly polarizing, politicized topics without being considered political in the process, but was rewarded for doing so in a system that continues to discourage mujeres of color from telling their own stories and speaking in their many voices and tongues.And I posit that reviews celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” help sustain this system, as they suggest that stories about immigration and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands can, and should be, told from a “neutral,” impersonal perspective; a dangerous precedent that heightens women of color writers’ risk of being deemed “mean,” “negative,” “whiny,” or “propagandistic” in drawing from their personal experiences and writing “our stories in our own words” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983, p. 23).
Olivia González is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former Ronald E. McNair scholar. Working at the intersections of critical media industry studies and education studies, Olivia’s research examines the politics of race and gender within contemporary structures of media education and production. Her current work and dissertation center on the storytelling practices and professional socialization of aspiring film and television creators of color.
