After gaining acclaim for her 2020 novel American Dirt, which included landing on the New York Times bestseller’s list and being selected for Oprah’s Book Club, author Jeanine Cummins didn’t think she would ever write again. It’s not a typical thought that crosses the mind of someone who writes a book that sells over three million copies worldwide in 37 languages.
“In order to be a novelist, if you’re doing it right, you have to be very vulnerable, [and] you have to open the vein,” Cummins, 50, told Remezcla during a recent interview. “It did not feel good the last time I opened the vein. It felt like everyone was standing by with lemon juice. So, to be someone from a Puerto Rican family, who suddenly came to represent white supremacy was surreal.”
Much of the criticism Cummins faced during that time came from fellow Latine writers, many of them with Mexican-American backgrounds, who considered American Dirt, the story of a Mexican mother and her son fleeing cartel violence, an example of cultural exploitation.
Mexican-American author Myriam Gurba (Mean) wrote an essay criticizing American Dirt and called it “trauma-porn.” Mexican-American author and activist David Bowles (They Call Me Güero) wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times where they called the book a “telenovela plot” full of “stereotypes and melodramatic tropes of the sort one might expect from an author who did not grow up within Mexican culture.”
“So, the question was, ‘Do you want to go back to the well and put yourself through that again?’” Cummins said. “It took me a long time to answer that question.”
After some self-reflection, Cummins has returned to the publishing world with her fifth novel, Speak to Me of Home. The book is described in press notes as “deeply informed by [Cummins’] Puerto Rican heritage” and one that “leans into her own cultural roots and the broader themes of inclusion and self-discovery.”
Speak to Me of Home tells the story of three generations of women whose relationships with place and identity are complex. The book begins in 1968 San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the story of Rafaela Acuña y Daubón. The narrative also follows Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth, growing up in 1980s St. Louis, Missouri, and Ruth’s own daughter, Daisy, who returns to San Juan decades later to reconnect with her roots.
“[After American Dirt], I found myself reflecting a lot about my identity, and that led me to think about my father’s life and his mother’s life,” Cummins said. “I had a few experiences when I was a kid that found their way into the pages of this book.”
Cummins pushes back on the criticism she’s received about only identifying as Puerto Rican when it serves her. People said she benefited from calling herself a Latina writer when American Dirt was published.
“I did five years of research [for American Dirt],” she said. “I went to Mexico [and] talked to all the experts in the field, scholars, humanitarian aid workers and migrants themselves. About three and a half years into writing the book, my father died. The result of my grief was American Dirt.”
Since many people didn’t know she had Puerto Rican roots on her father’s side, when the subject of her ethnicity came up, she felt that “in order to debunk [American Dirt],” critics also had to debunk her own background.
“That was a very weird experience to feel that my identity was being adjudicated by people who didn’t know me,” she said. “For a time, I worried that maybe there was something artificial about the way that I was experiencing my identity. Maybe I was doing it wrong.”
Cummins said she never would’ve thought she would find herself on a national stage defending her identity and trying to account for her broken Spanish. That was part of the impetus for her wanting to do more research for her new book.
“I felt ashamed like I was somehow experiencing my identity wrong,” she said. “But I want to be very clear about one thing, which is that all my books have trauma at the center, and they are about surviving hard things. The trauma is mine.”
Cummins speaks of trauma from a broader perspective. She said she understands that although experiencing trauma is something universal, she knows that the trauma the characters in American Dirt experienced “was not my own.”
With Speak to Me of Home, Cummins hopes that the pride in her Puerto Rican heritage is evident and how it was “fundamental” to her as a child and now as an adult, who identifies as someone who has a mixed ethnicity.“I am very proud of my Latina roots,” she said. “I always understood that there was a gap between the way I perceive myself and the way other people perceive me. Navigating that gap was the seed of [Speak to Me of Home]. Now, I understand very clearly that it is no one else’s job to tell me who I am.”
