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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Oakdale Library | 921 HERNANDEZ | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 HERNANDEZ | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 304.873 HER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
An NPR Best Book of the Year
A 2020 International Latino Book Award Finalist
An Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year
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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet Castillo (Cenzontle) opens this impressionistic memoir of growing up as an undocumented immigrant with a gripping flashback to when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the then-teen's family home in Marysville, Calif. "We never opened our door or windows again," he writes, even though it was Castillo's father, long-since deported, the agents sought. Moving forward to 2014, a provision of the "Dreamers" program allowed the 25-year-old Castillo and his wife, Rubi, to return to Tepechitlán, Mexico, for a bittersweet visit with his father, who was still hoping to return to the U.S. During the roller-coaster ride of the next two years, Castillo received his American visa, but his father failed to return north ("We were still trying to cross, still moving in maddening helplessness, a revolving door without an exit"), and his mother moved back to Tepechitlán to be with her husband. Throughout, Castillo examines other borders and boundaries in his life, including being bisexual and bilingual. Additionally, he writes of the difficulties reconciling his professional achievements as a creative writing teacher with his family's struggles ("That was my new job, to read and write... and I didn't think I deserved that kind of comfort"). Castillo writes with disturbing candor, depicting the all-too-common plight of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. (Jan.)
Kirkus Review
An acclaimed Mexican-born poet's account of the sometimes-overwhelming struggles he and his parents faced in their quest to become American citizens.Hernandez Castillo (Cenzontle, 2018, etc.) first came to the United States with his undocumented Mexican parents in 1993. But life in the shadows came at a high price. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided their home on multiple occasions and eventually deported the author's father back to Mexico. In this emotionally raw memoir, Hernandez Castillo explores his family's traumas through a fractured narrative that mirrors their own fragmentation. Of his own personal experiences, he writes, "when I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility." To protect himself against possible identification as an undocumented person, he excelled in school and learned English "better than any white person, any citizen." When he was old enough to work, he created a fake social security card to apply for the jobs that helped him support his fatherless family. After high school, he attended college and married a Mexican American woman. He became an MFA student at the University of Michigan and qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed him to visit his father in Mexico, where he discovered the depth of his cultural disorientation. Battling through ever present anxiety, the author revisited his and his parents' origins and then returned to take on the difficult interview that qualified him for a green card. His footing in the U.S. finally solidified, Hernandez Castillo unsuccessfully attempted to help his father and mother qualify for residency in the U.S. Only after his father was kidnapped by members of a drug cartel was the author able to help his mother, whose life was now in danger, seek asylum in the U.S. Honest and unsparing, this book offers a detailed look at the dehumanizing immigration system that shattered the author's family while offering a glimpse into his own deeply conflicted sense of what it means to live the so-called American dream.A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Poet and activist Castillo's artistic family memoir takes place largely away from the U.S.-Mexico border, but in a social and emotional world where the border is always present. In short chapters traversing time and space, Castillo writes of his childhood as an undocumented immigrant before DACA was implemented, presenting a powerful, kaleidoscopic arrangement of history and thought. In the lead up to Castillo's own border crossings as an adult with green card status, readers meet multiple generations of his family. While the border is the site of recurring traumas, Castillo manages to draw uncanny powers of observation from its presence in his life. VERDICT In large part an attempt to answer the question of how to create a landscape of memories divorced from spectacle, this inventively rendered memoir provides an intimate, important look at the immigrant experience, family and intergenerational trauma, and coping with the ongoing presence of uncertainty in one's life.--Sierra Dickey, Ctr. for New Americans, Northampton, MA
Table of Contents
| [Movement As A Trix Cereal Commercial] | p. 1 |
| First Movement: DACA | p. 9 |
| Second Movement: Interview on Allegiance | p. 75 |
| Third Movement: Sentence Served | p. 115 |
| Fourth Movement: Glass | p. 205 |
| Fifth Movement: Asylum | p. 301 |
| Further Notes And Observations | p. 355 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 359 |
| Notes | p. 361 |
