Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo Narrated by Tim Andres Pabon

Overview

An*Entertainment Weekly*Most Anticipated Book of 2020

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.

Editorial Reviews

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

Narrator Tim Andrés Pabon shares memoirist Castillo's emotionally rich observations about his own and his family's undocumented lives in the U.S. Pabon's low-key approach to this personal story sometimes verges on the sonorous, even as Castillo describes his father's physical brutality and his own feelings of guilt at how he has been able to feel at home in California while his parents and their peers considered the state to be a temporary setting for the purpose of earning money to send home to Mexico. Pabon uses distinctly Spanish pronunciations for American place names—Yakima, Modesto—and allows an appropriate chuckle to creep into his voice occasionally. Altogether, this performance resonates as storytelling by a family member who was usually the quiet older brother. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 11/11/2019

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. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

This moving memoir is the document of a life without documents, of belonging to two countries yet belonging to neither. Hernandez Castillo has created his own papers fashioned from memory and poetry. His motherland is la madre tierra, his life a history lesson for our times.” — Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

"In this courageous memoir, Castillo lays bare his emotional truths with remarkable intimacy and insight. Ever the poet, Castillo can’t resist a lyrical stroke here and there, like when he describes arriving in Mexico 'the same way as the light entered the rosary, and when we departed the corridors of its prisms, we did so no longer wholly intact either, a little broken.' The same outcome awaits the reader who encounters this book." — Los Angeles Times

"The award-winning poet turns to memoir with the devastating account of his family's immigration to the U.S., from terrifying encounters with ICE offers to his father's ultimate deportation." — Entertainment Weekly

"Castillo writes with disturbing candor, depicting the all-too-common plight of undocumented immigrants to the U.S." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Castillo uses his prodigious poetic craft to plumb each family member’s odyssey through the U.S. immigration system...and to describe the raw emotion and pain experienced while...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." — Booklist (starred review)

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.
— Kirkus Reviews

Entertainment Weekly

"The award-winning poet turns to memoir with the devastating account of his family's immigration to the U.S., from terrifying encounters with ICE offers to his father's ultimate deportation."

|Los Angeles Times

"In this courageous memoir, Castillo lays bare his emotional truths with remarkable intimacy and insight. Ever the poet, Castillo can’t resist a lyrical stroke here and there, like when he describes arriving in Mexico 'the same way as the light entered the rosary, and when we departed the corridors of its prisms, we did so no longer wholly intact either, a little broken.' The same outcome awaits the reader who encounters this book."

Sandra Cisneros

This moving memoir is the document of a life without documents, of belonging to two countries yet belonging to neither. Hernandez Castillo has created his own papers fashioned from memory and poetry. His motherland is la madre tierra, his life a history lesson for our times.

Booklist (starred review)

"Castillo uses his prodigious poetic craft to plumb each family member’s odyssey through the U.S. immigration system...and to describe the raw emotion and pain experienced while...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."

Los Angeles Times

"In this courageous memoir, Castillo lays bare his emotional truths with remarkable intimacy and insight. Ever the poet, Castillo can’t resist a lyrical stroke here and there, like when he describes arriving in Mexico 'the same way as the light entered the rosary, and when we departed the corridors of its prisms, we did so no longer wholly intact either, a little broken.' The same outcome awaits the reader who encounters this book."

Booklist (starred review)

"Castillo uses his prodigious poetic craft to plumb each family member’s odyssey through the U.S. immigration system...and to describe the raw emotion and pain experienced while...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."

Library Journal

12/01/2019

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

Kirkus Reviews

2019-09-24
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173964366
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/28/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	496,051

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