Cummins might have created an interesting drug lord, but Javier is pure fiction. None of these guys could have been Bill Gates, in this or any other life. Or Nemesio Oseguera, “ El Mencho,” who runs the CJNG cartel, Mexico’s most dangerous and violent criminal organization. Rather, they resemble people like Juan Ulises Laredo, known as “ the Virus,” leader of one of the dominant gangs in the region that Cummins depicts. Mexican drug lords are not aspiring poets who read Irish fiction or enjoy delicate French cocoa bites. “In another life, he could’ve been Bill Gates,” Lydia’s husband tells her, just as proto-Gates tries to seduce his wife with a box of chocolates from Jacques Genin, straight from the 7 th arrondissement in Paris.Īgain: This doesn’t mean that Javier is not an amusing and often terrifying character. A (mediocre) poet and a romantic, Cummins’ drug lord is sophisticated to the point of parody.

He playfully quotes Gabriel García Márquez and seems to enjoy Sebastian Barry, to Lydia’s infinite delight.

Gangster Javier is a debonair, book-loving Latin lover. At least for now, not many in Mexico seem to really care that a woman named Jeanine Cummins has dared to write about us. If she wants to write about Mexico, so be it-Mexico and the Mexican immigrant experience are terrific subjects for a novel that deserves many outstanding books, perhaps even a definitive one that could surely be written from the United States by an American writer. ( Under the Volcano is just one of many great ones.) Although I find the lack of diversity in America’s publishing industry appalling, I couldn’t care less if Cummins is white, not Mexican, or not a first-generation immigrant herself. In both literature and journalism, examples abound of brilliant authors who have illuminated countries and themes that were, initially, outside their familiar milieu. There is no reason, literary or otherwise, to challenge an author’s legitimacy to tackle any topic, much less based on her ethnicity or nationality. I have disagreed with many of the attempts to question her right to fictionalize Mexico’s predicament simply because she long identified as white.

As a Mexican journalist living in the United States who has written extensively about both my country’s struggle with violence and the Hispanic immigrant experience, I even wanted to support it.įirst, I thought Cummins had been treated unfairly. I wanted to like American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’ much-debated novel about a young mother and her son who, after an act of brutality, find themselves in a desperate attempt to escape the clutches of a drug cartel in southern Mexico. How to Talk to Your Kids About Difficult News Events, Such as the Coronation of King Charles The Woman Behind Bridgerton Would Like to Explain Those Controversial Remarks

Janine cummings