Children of the Land

October 15, 2019
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.

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Starred review from November 11, 2019
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.

December 1, 2019

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

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2019
Prize-winning poet (Cenzontle, 2018) Castillo's memoir begins with a surprise visit from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers who explode into his Saturday morning of cartoons and a bowl of Trix. From that initial trauma, the author careens through his life story, bouncing from one pivotal moment to the next. From being smuggled into the U.S. as a child to his father's deportation back to Tepechitl�n, Zacatecas, and his and his mother's green-card application processes, Castillo creates a nonchronological structure of five grand movements, each divided into bite-sized sections that are quickly read but not so easily digested. He keeps the narrative nimble by breaking up the sections in unexpected ways with numbered lists, footnotes, and italicized conversations. Castillo uses his prodigious poetic craft to plumb each family member's odyssey through the U.S. immigration system and its Kafkaesque and labyrinthine illogic and to describe the raw emotion and pain experienced while battering against the cold shoulder of bureaucracy and living under a cloud of uncertainty and fear. In the tortured dynamic that plays out in his cross-border family, Castillo lays bare the inherent unfairness and high psychological toll of the current immigration system on people in both the U.S. and Mexico.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)