BookBrowse Reviews Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

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A young poet and professor describes his life growing up as an undocumented child of migrant workers. A significant literary achievement sure to inspire generations to come.

In this exquisitely crafted memoir, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo describes coming of age as a young man and a poet. His childhood is complicated by being born in Zacatecas, Mexico but moving to California's Central Valley with his parents and siblings at age five in 1993. Castillo shows that an undocumented life in the United States is a life threaded with fear of deportation—often punctuated by partial-truth, silences, loss and a shimmering dream that's just out of reach:

There were things I could not hide, things that would come out of me and expose me in my most vulnerable moments. It was my skin, my dark hair, my cheekbones, that I swore would give me away. I was afraid of the way I walked.

The author's parents, called Ama and Apa in the book, work hard and provide relative stability for the family until his father is deported when Marcelo is fifteen. His mother remains in California to raise five children on her own. She struggles with a disability caused by a negligent driver; she works demanding hours in agriculture. Marcelo completes high school, attends college and eventually gains status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program (see Beyond the Book), where he can finally work with legal papers.

Beyond being a powerful immigration story, this narrative resonates with other potent themes. Castillo describes an uneasy relationship with his demanding and angry father; inherited trauma; a quest to reconnect with his ancestral home; his emerging sense of responsibility for self, siblings and parents in the face of extreme challenges. He grows into multiple (often heroic) identities: son (both rebellious and dutiful), brother, provider, student, lover, friend, outsider, legal advocate, protector, husband, professor, translator, father. Universal coming-of-age themes are consistently layered with, and inform, the author's particular experience as the son of migrant agricultural workers.

The memoir is developed in chapters called "Movements," which advance according to the geography of the narrator's fluctuating state of mind. This non-chronological structure works because it reflects how capricious memory can be. The author's introspection is informed by external circumstances: alienation at grade school, his father's abrupt deportation, a nervous journey to discover his ancestral home in Zacatecas. He reflects:

I was going to take back what was stolen from me. My childhood was stolen, I had no memory of it whatsoever. It wasn't my choice to forget; there were things my mind decided were best I didn't remember. Maybe if I touched the places where I (and those who came before me in my family) were born, then something would come back to me.

The author also describes an evolving relationship with his girlfriend, Rubi; the couple's interview for a green card; anxieties; struggles for sobriety; self-imposed displacement to Michigan for graduate school; negotiating for his mother's asylum after she's placed in ICE detention near Tijuana; and other twists, turns, sacrifices and hard-won triumphs. Throughout, story lines connect with the author's intellectual determination to place his own experience in a broader historical context. He describes his father's sacrifices and work in agriculture during the 1970s and '80s:

And on the hottest days, Apa said it almost felt nice when the crop dusters sprayed the neighboring field, how cool it felt when the pesticide mist poured over them with the slightest breeze.

From a young age, poetry offers a sanctuary to Castillo, a way to translate his life dynamics into something new—a safe, secret space between the self and the pen and paper. While grappling with self-doubts in grad school, Castillo reflects on earlier years spent doing heavy labor on construction sites:

What I wouldn't give to see my poems like I saw the houses I built—large things with many windows. But one thing was true: those poems were mine, and no one else's. Those houses never were. Sometimes I wrote my name behind walls that would be covered up forever.

The author's poetry collections Dulce (2018) and Cenzontle (2018) have led to prestigious prizes. Castillo is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award and a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and his profound dedication to the power of language shines through each page of this book, which he creates as a sanctuary just as others may build houses of stone and wood. However, during a high-stakes immigration interview, Castillo still fears rejection:

I was worried they would see something about me they wouldn't like. Would this country want another poet?

The answer should be a resounding "yes." Especially a poet with the courage to share this complex and intimate coming-of-age story.

In this book, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo navigates a wide variety of borders: ancestral, emotional, mental, idiomatic and geographic. Similar to recent memoirs like Reyna Grande's The Distance Between Us (La distancia entre nosotros) and Trevor Noah's Born a Crime, which explore coming of age between cultures, Children of the Land reveals how a person can push the limits of endurance, survive and transform their experience into literature. This debut memoir offers intersectional themes for discussion in book groups, classrooms, men's groups, parenting circles and communities.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in February 2020, and has been updated for the October 2020 edition. Click here to go to this issue.