During the controversy over Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt, David Bowles, whose online biography indicates he is a “Mexican-American author and translator from deep South Texas [who] teaches literature and Nahuatl at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley,” has emerged as one of the book’s fiercest critics. First he wrote a piece for Medium, “Cummins’ Non-Mexican Crap,” that got circulated widely. Then, apparently on the basis of the strength of that article, he received two enviable professional rewards: a New York Times column making a similar case against the book, under the headline “‘American Dirt’ Is Proof the Publishing Industry Is Broken,” and a chance to be one of a small group of activists who met directly with American Dirt’s publisher, Flatiron Books, to voice their complaints.

Because I’m working on a freelance article about this controversy, I downloaded a Kindle copy of American Dirt on Friday and finished it the next day. After re-reading Bowles’ Medium post and Times column with knowledge of the full contents of American Dirt, it became clear to me that the distance between the book he describes and the book that was actually published is simply astonishing. The two don’t resemble one another at all. In fact, I think there is a strong case to be made, given the very basic misunderstandings and distortions present in Bowles’ critiques of American Dirt, that he simply hasn’t read the book. If he has, he either read it very hastily or is lying about what is and isn’t in it.

The bulk of this post will be devoted to simply recounting two of Bowles’ most important, damning claims, and then comparing them directly to a bunch of text from American Dirt. I’m taking the time to do this because I’m a veteran of online outrage campaigns — both writing about them and, less frequently, being the subject of them — because they drive me crazy, because I think they’re only getting worse, and because I think people should stand up and point out bad-faith, tendentious criticism when they encounter it.

This particular outrage campaign fits a common pattern: During the pileon, the target’s actions are distorted far past the point of real-world recognizability, their reputation is attacked in unfair ways, and misleading rumors are spread about what they did. This happens largely because of dishonest actors who arrive at the scene of the controversy like ambulance-chasers, ready to leverage the chaos to their advantage (though sometimes these opportunists are the ones “causing the crash” in the first place). Here, as during other controversies, there are kernels of genuine concern that merit discussion and action. While my own grasp of the Spanish language is muy malo, and I therefore am more hesitant to address those issues than ones pertaining more straightforwardly to the plain English text of the novel itself, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the criticisms leveled at Cummins over the novel’s Spanish (including by Bowles) are valid. I also think that Flatiron Books’ much-discussed use of barbed wire as a decorating motif during a book party was distasteful and offensive, even if it was based on the book’s cover, and that Cummins and her publisher erred, in the book’s Author’s Note, in describing Cummins’ husband as having once been ‘undocumented’ without mentioning that he is Irish — in the U.S., there is a big difference between being Irish and undocumented and being Mexican and undocumented, and it stands to reason that some readers interpreted ‘undocumented’ to mean ‘Mexican’ given that they had just read an entire novel about migrants attempting to enter the U.S. without documentation. And beyond this particular book, publishing clearly has major work to do when it comes to diversity and representation. I’m not denying any of that.

But the fact is that the conversation surrounding American Dirt has included a great deal of misinformation, which is neither fair to Cummins nor productive from the point of view of discussing these issues seriously. And Bowles has spread crucial misconceptions about the book, including in the most important newspaper in the country, if not the world — all without having familiarized himself with the bare-basic plot essentials (again, assuming he isn’t simply lying).

For each of the two key items below, you’ll find a summary from me comparing what Bowles says is (or isn’t) in American Dirt to the actual content of the book, and then a bunch of direct excerpts backing up my case. All text and page numbers come directly from my Kindle copy of the book, and there may be some slight pagination inaccuracy given how the Kindle app works on my PC. I’m at jesse.r.singal@gmail.com if you have any questions or if you want to notify me about any inaccuracies of my own. I should be clear that in two ways, this post is not exhaustive: I’m not addressing each and every questionable or bad-faith argument Bowles makes, and I’m not providing every example of a passage that refutes Bowles’ misinformation, because life is short.

Crap, okay — I can’t resist mentioning two other, smaller examples of how shockingly bad-faith Bowles’ treatment of this book is before moving on to the meatier stuff. “Cummins clearly wants us to be startled at how ‘erudite’ and ‘elegant’ some of the males are,” he writes in his Medium post. “‘OMG! Really?’ I imagine some US reader gasping. ‘In Mexico? Aren’t all men uncouth swarthy beasts?’” In context, this is asinine — Cummins has a character use ‘erudite’ in conversation to refer to a cartel leader responsible for a veritable tidal wave of bloodshed, but who is also a softspoken- and gentle-seeming wannabe poet, which, yes, is a bit surprising. She only uses ‘elegant’ once, to refer to his watch, and only uses ‘elegantly’ once, to refer to how he looks in a photograph. The idea that this is an attempt to appeal to American readers’ racism, or a reflection of that racism, or both, is insane. Elsewhere in his Medium post, Bowles argues that a letter from that selfsame cartel leader to one of the protagonists, presented in-text in both Spanish and English, is written in a stilted manner, suggesting, again, that Cummins failed to do her linguistic homework. “The Spanish is … not idiomatic at all,” he writes. But by this point Cummins has established that he is a terrible poet! We shouldn’t expect him to write in a natural, fluid way! (Notice how many plot details you need to be aware of in order to understand why these criticisms are so ridiculous; on Twitter, people are much more likely to reflexively spread outrage over a book than to find a copy and read it.)

My arguments here are simple: It is morally wrong to publicly spread damaging misinformation about someone, it is arguably more morally wrong to do so during an outrage moment, when many onlookers’ critical faculties shut down a bit, and if someone get professionally rewarded for taking part in these morally bad acts, as Bowles has, that means something, somewhere, is broken. That’s all I’m saying.

(As in any case in which I’m writing without the aid of a copy editor, I’m reserving the right to jump into this post and make small corrections without noting them. Also, if you are unfamiliar with my work and enjoy this post, you might like my newsletter, which you can find at jessesingal.substack.com, and where I’ve done two posts on this controversy. Finally, if you want to better familiarize yourself with these sorts of pileons in young-adult publishing, which is usually where they take place, definitely read Kat Rosenfield’s piece in Vulture, and if you want to better understand online-outrage dynamics in general, watch ContraPoints’ long video on the subject, since it’s the best recent entry in that subgenre.)

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Issue 1: Bowles describes as ‘inexplicable’ Lydia’s decision to travel north with Luca on La Bestia, the notoriously dangerous train some migrants use to traverse Mexico on their way to the United States, claiming that this is ridiculous given that she has the money and could simply hop a flight to Canada. But in reality, American Dirt clearly explains, in detail, exactly why Lydia chooses that route, and why the fact that she has money is irrelevant: She and Luca lack their passports since they had to flee home so quickly; they can’t even board a domestic flight because she is similarly without the requisite papers to bring Luca on board with her; other landborn routes risk bringing them in contact with roadblocks controlled by Los Jardineros, the cartel they are fleeing; and La Bestia, because it is mostly ridden by impoverished migrants, offers them a shot at relative anonymity they might not find with any other mode of transportation. So much text is dedicated to explaining how Lydia and Luca end up on that train that, at the risk of repeating myself, it’s really impossible to see how anyone could have read this book and come away wondering aloud about this plot point.

Textual evidence:

Bowles, Medium: “Lydia and Luca — despite having money — escape to the precious freedom of the US aboard La Bestia (that dangerous, crime-infested train) because of COURSE they do. But they don’t suffer the maiming, abuse, theft, and rape so common on that gang-controlled artery to the border.”

Bowles, NYT: “[Lydia makes] the inexplicable choice of a relatively wealthy woman to leap onto La Bestia, a gang-controlled train — rather than just take a plane to Canada.”

American Dirt, 76–77: “The mouse pointer trembles on the screen, but she manages to click out of the news and shift gears. Carlos will get them as far as Mexico City, but what then? She must try to make plans. She researches the buses, and yes, there are reports of increased roadblocks across the area, an uptick in disappearances. Travel within cities is relatively safe, but between cities it is strongly discouraged. Authorities advise deferring nonessential trips on regional highways in Guerrero, Colima, and Michoacán. Lydia feels a new wave of despair threatening to descend, but she doesn’t have time for it. The roads are not an option. Even if her driver’s license were current, she wouldn’t risk driving with Luca right now, and the buses are no better. The roadblocks are too dangerous. So what’s left? She checks airline tickets, although she doesn’t love the idea of her name being on a flight manifest. Everything is digital now, and what good will it do to run a thousand miles away if her name raises a red flag in some online database? Tijuana is about as far as you can get without a passport, and that flight is three hours and forty minutes. Plenty of time for Javier to send a sicario to greet them when they deplane. Lydia imagines carnage at the baggage claim. She can see the headlines. There are no long-distance passenger trains in Mexico, so as a last resort, Lydia studies the freight trains the Central American migrants ride across the length of the country. All the way from Chiapas to Chihuahua, they cling to the tops of the cars. The train has earned the name La Bestia because that journey is a mission of terror in every way imaginable. Violence and kidnapping are endemic along the tracks, and apart from the criminal dangers, migrants are also maimed or killed every day when they fall from the tops of the trains. Only the poorest and most destitute of people attempt to travel this way. Lydia shudders at the YouTube stories, the photographs, the grim warnings delivered by recent amputees. She starts over, researches everything again from the beginning. Buses, planes, trains. There has to be something she hasn’t considered. There has to be a way out. She clicks and scrolls and hours pass like sludge, while Luca turns page after page.”

American Dirt, 90–91:

“Very good,” the woman says brightly, but Luca worries that her smile has turned a little stale. “We can get you on a return flight, let’s see, how about 12:55 p.m. Gets in here at 6:28 p.m., nonstop.” Mami nods. “Good, yes, good. What’s the price?” The woman adjusts her red scarf as she scrolls down. Her fingernails are square and they’re painted the color of concrete. They click when she taps on the screen. “Three thousand six hundred ten pesos each.” Mami nods again, and swings her backpack around to balance it on her knee. She takes out her wallet from the side pocket while the woman continues clacking on the keyboard. “I can pay in cash?” “Yes, of course,” the woman says. “I just need photo ID.” Mami has separated their money into various places, keeping around 10,000 pesos in the wallet. Luca watches while she counts out the bills for the tickets, seven pink, two orange, one blue. She stacks the notes on the counter, and the woman picks them up to begin counting. Mami digs into the sleeve of the wallet then and retrieves her voter ID card, which makes a little snap when she places it on the counter. The ticket agent sets the money across her keyboard and picks up Mami’s ID. She holds it in one hand and types with the other. “Thank you.” She hands the card back to Mami and looks at Luca. “And what about you?” She smiles. “Did you bring your voter registration card?” Luca wags his head. He obviously can’t vote. She returns her attention to Mami. “So I just need a birth certificate or some documentation to verify legal custody.” “Of my son?” Mami asks. “Yes.” Mami shakes her head, and the skin around her eyes flushes pink. Luca thinks she might cry. “I don’t have,” she says. “I don’t have that.” “Oh.” The woman clasps her hands together and leans back from her keyboard. “I’m afraid he can’t fly without it.” “Surely you can make an exception? He’s obviously my son.” Luca nods. “I’m sorry,” the ticket agent says. “It’s not our policy — it’s the law. Every airline is the same.” She’s neatening the colorful money back into its stack. She’s handing the stack back to Mami, but Mami won’t take it, so she sets it on the counter between them. “Please,” Mami says, dropping her voice low and leaning in. “Please, we are desperate. We have to get out of the city. This is the only way, please.” “Señora, I’m sorry. I wish I could help you. You’ll have to visit the Oficina Central del Registro Civil and request a copy of the birth certificate or you won’t be able to fly. There’s nothing I can do. Even if I could give you a ticket, you wouldn’t make it past security.” Mami snatches the money and jams it into the back pocket of her jeans along with her ID. Her face is still changing colors, and now it looks whitened, washed-out.

American Dirt, 94–95:

Lydia pulls her eyes away from Luca and focuses on the screen in front of her. Her search now is borne not only of panic, but of true desperation. There are no other options left for them. She opens a browser and finds the route that brings La Bestia closest to Mexico City. She lifts the headphones from their hook beside the computer and plugs them in. She checks YouTube first, and it’s all horrible. So much more horrible than she even imagined. But it’s better to know, to be prepared. She makes herself watch, and she pays no mind to the quickening of her breath or the racing of her pulse while she absorbs the stories. The possible manners of death available on La Bestia are all gruesome: You can be crushed between two moving cars when the train rounds a bend. You can fall asleep, roll off the edge, get sucked beneath the wheels, have your legs sliced off. (When that happens, if the migrant isn’t killed instantly, he usually bleeds to death in a remote corner of some farmer’s field before anyone finds him.) And finally, there’s the ubiquity of ordinary human violence: You can die by beating or stabbing or shooting. Robbery is a foregone conclusion. Mass abductions for ransom are commonplace. Often, kidnappers torture their victims to help persuade their families to pay. On the trains, a uniform seldom represents what it purports to represent. Half the people pretending to be migrants or coyotes or train engineers or police or la migra are working for the cartel. Everybody’s on the take. Here’s a Guatemalan man — twenty-two years old — who lost both legs three days before his interview. He’s missing a front tooth as well. “Somebody told me, before we got on the train,” he says, “if you fall, if you see your arm or your leg getting sucked under there, you have a split second to decide whether or not to put your head in there too.” The young man blinks into the camera. “I made the wrong choice,” he says. When she’s seen enough of the horror stories, Lydia bows her head for a moment to assess her state of mind. Because despite everything she’s just seen, she also knows that, like all criminal enterprises in Mexico, La Bestia is controlled by the cartels. Or rather, by a specific cartel, the mother of all cartels, an organization so nightmarish that people won’t utter its name, and in this moment that’s the key factor for Lydia. Because that cartel is not Los Jardineros. She knows from Sebastián’s research that Javier’s influence now extends well beyond the borders of Guerrero, that he has established alliances with cartels that stretch the length of Mexico. That he controls plazas as far away as Coahuila along the Texas border. But if that reach extends to La Bestia, she knows it must be limited there. Javier is not the jefe on the trains. So her choice, then, is whether to escape one monster by running into the den of another. Half a million people survive this journey every year, she tells herself. This will provide anonymity. No one will be looking for them on La Bestia. Javier would never imagine her traveling this way; she can scarcely imagine it herself. So perhaps she and Luca will have the same chance as anybody else at surviving the beast. Perhaps their chances will be better, in fact, because they have the means to prepare for the journey, and they’ve already proven themselves to be survivors.

Issue 2: Bowles decries American Dirt for presenting American readers with “a flattened pastiche version of Mexico, a dark hellhole of the sort Trump rails against, geographically and culturally indistinct.” But in reality, American Dirt explicitly lays out what makes different regions of Mexico distinct from one another, including sundry geographical and architectural and cultural differences, and doesn’t come close to presenting the country, in toto, as anything like a ‘hellhole.’ Rather, Cummins presents it as a large, complicated nation grappling with the effects of drug cartels and government corruption. In the book, many Mexicans live in peace and relative prosperity, and are sympathetic to the plight of migrants to the point of offering them whatever assistance then can — no hellholes there. (Though elsewhere in American Dirt, to be clear, there are evil actors who prey upon these same migrants, just as there are in real life.) In American Dirt, the violence hits different regions during different periods, exactly like in real life, and Cummins makes it clear that given the size of the country residents of one region can be enjoying relatively low levels of violent crime while residents of another feel besieged by cartel warfare and terrorism.

Textual evidence:

Bowles, Medium: “People are stereotypes in this novel, participating in stereotypical activities (quinceañeras, for example). They live in a flattened pastiche version of Mexico, a dark hellhole of the sort Trump rails against, geographically and culturally indistinct.”

American Dirt, p. 50: “It seems impossible that back then, just so recently, Acapulco was bright with tourists and music and the shops and the sea. Rock pigeons strutted across the sand. Vast foreign cruise ships disgorged their sneakered passengers onto the streets, their pockets fat with dollars, their skin glistening from coconut-scented sunscreen. The dollars filled the bars and restaurants. In Lydia’s bookshop, they filled the register. Those tourists bought the guidebooks and atlases, along with serious novels and frivolous novels and souvenir key chains and tiny tubes of sand corked with tiny stoppers that Lydia kept in a big fishbowl beside the register.”

American Dirt, 54: “In those days, the state of Guerrero felt safe, insulated. Their country had its share of narcotraficantes back then, but they felt as distant as Hollywood or Al Qaeda. The violence would erupt in concentrated, faraway bursts: first Ciudad Juárez, then Sinaloa, then Michoacán. Acapulco, ringed by mountains and sea, retained its sunny bubble of protective tourism. The salty ocean air, the wheeling calls of the seagulls, the big sunglasses, the wind whipping down the boulevard to toss the ladies’ hair around their sun-browned faces, it all intensified.”

American Dirt, 55: “Lydia looked out over the landscape, at the sunshine leaning between the distant peaks, the terraces of clouds stepping down toward the irregular earth, the rooftops and steeples of the fleeting villages, and she felt safe with her new husband in their little orange car. At Chilpancingo they often stopped for a coffee or a sandwich. Sometimes they met with friends — Sebastián’s college roommate lived there with his wife and the baby who became Sebastián’s godson. And then a couple hours later, in Mexico City, they’d find a cheap hotel and walk the city for hours. Museums, shows, restaurants, dancing, window-shopping, the Bosque de Chapultepec.”

American Dirt, 61: “Once they pass out of la zona centro, Luca sees that Chilpancingo isn’t so different from Acapulco. There are no seagulls here, no tourists, and the streets aren’t as broad. But there are many colorful shops and taxis, people wearing their church clothes in the sunshine. There are ladies with handbags slung over their shoulders, boys with slipshod tattoos. Plenty of bright, foamy graffiti. The houses are all painted in vivid colors. Luca watches them flip by like cards in a deck. After three and a half songs have played on the radio, Carlos turns onto a street that’s slightly wider than the others. There’s an arching canopy of shade trees that creates the sense of entering a secret place, a hushy hideout. In the middle of the block stands a handsome white church with modest twin bell towers at the front. It’s the kind they’re used to. Católica. The other buildings on the crowded street stand back from the little church, giving it room.”

American Dirt, 91: “Everything is different here from Acapulco, and Luca struggles to take in all the color: the whipping flags, the fruit vendors, the baroque colonial buildings sitting shoulder to shoulder with their blocky modern neighbors. Music spills from wrought iron balconies, vendors hawk rows of luminous refrescos, and everywhere there is art, art, art. Murals, paintings, sculptures, graffiti. On one street corner, a colorful statue of tall Jesus — that’s how Luca thinks of it because it’s small for a statue but very tall for an adult human — stands with one fold of his bright green robe slung jauntily over his arm. Beneath this genuine onslaught of sensory stimulation, Luca manages to temporarily bury his guilt. His mouth hangs slightly open as he walks beside Mami, gulping in the scenery.”

American Dirt, 111: “The Casa del Migrante is a gathering of tents and simple structures on a large, flat parcel of land that’s saved from being beautiful only by the utilitarian character of its buildings. The wide road that separates the casa from the railroad tracks is of dirt and rubble, and it’s empty as far as Luca can see. It’s flat here for a long stretch, but in the distance, when he allows his eyes to follow the tracks to the horizon, Luca can see the landscape erupt upward on both sides. The clouds, puffy and brilliant, come down to meet it. There are bald fields all around and behind the casa, and on the far side of the tracks as well, but Luca can see that the soil has been tended, turned, striped with darker bands of earth where the farmers will sow their crops at the right season. There’s a rich mineral scent on the wind.”

American Dirt, 121–122: “To Lydia, the change had felt sudden, lurching. She’d gone to bed the night before in the same city where she’d been born and raised, where she’d lived her entire life except for the brief spin of years through college in Mexico City. Her dreams had been populated by the same whipped current of ocean air, the same bright, liquid colors, the same thrumming beats and aromas of her childhood, the same languorous swaying of hips that had always defined the pace of life here in this place she knew so well. Sure, there had been new violence, an unfamiliar hitch of anxiety. Sure, crime was on the rise. But until that morning, the truth had felt insulated beneath the illusory film of Acapulco’s previous immunity. And then Sebastián’s headline had ripped that protective skin away. All at once, the people had to look and to see. They could pretend no longer: Acapulco Falls. Briefly, Lydia hated her husband for that headline. She hated his editor.”

American Dirt, 149: “Their eyes comb the landscape for movement beyond the men loading and unloading freight from the hollow cars beneath them. Sometimes the working men throw snacks up to the migrants on top of the train before it leaves, or refill their water bottles from a nearby hose. Other times, it’s as if the men have been warned not to aid the migrants, like they’re invisible on top of the train, and those times are like careful choreography, all pretending not to see or be seen.”

American Dirt, 184: “When the warehouses give way to brick and cinder block homes, the migrants are cheered by the appearance of two pigtailed girls in school uniforms, one slightly larger than the other, one with dimples, and one with a scab on her knee. Their mother sits at a wooden stall nearby, with a cooler of drinks and a small grill. She’s selling lemonade and hot ears of grilled corn. A fat baby sleeps in a stroller by her side. There’s a large basket there, to which the girls return in swoops, retrieving armloads of little white paper bags. These they pass out to the migrants with their blessings.”

American Dirt, 210: “She feels her chest opening with something like relief as the train moves away from the city. A half hour north, the landscape is commandeered by miles of squat, spiky plants. They stretch into the distance along both sides of the tracks, their gray-green fronds like a million waving hands, and the train slows slightly at the outskirts of a town where the buildings are quaint and well kept. Lydia notes the sweet, sticky aroma of fermenting agave plants. Tequila.”

American Dirt, 210: “The train thunders on toward Tepic, toward Acaponeta, toward El Rosario. For a long time then, they pass nothing at all. Just grass and dirt and trees and sky. The occasional building, a rare cow. It’s pastoral, beautiful, and the morning air is fresh. Lydia feels a treacherous pang of smothered delight, a bewilderment of migrant as fleeting tourist, as if they’re on vacation looking out across some exotic landscape. It’s brief.”

American Dirt, 250: “There are cultivated fields on both sides of the tracks, and Luca watches the farmer, sometimes on a tractor, sometimes on foot, as he tends to the rows of whatever crop he’s hoping to grow there in the rich seams of dirt. The farmer lets the stranded migrants fill their bottles from a long hose, and the water it dispenses is warm but clean.”

American Dirt, 261: “In the morning, a local resident drapes a hose over the garden wall so the migrants can brush their teeth, wet their faces, and fill their canteens. A contingent of older ladies walks the tracks, passing out blessings with homemade bagged sandwiches and pickles. A guard from the hut calls Luca over and passes him a grape lollipop through the chain-link fence.”

American Dirt, 300: “They’re in the far west of the city, only steps from the border, and Soledad paces the street outside, up and down the hill, watching the emptiness on the other side. The border is unnatural here, a sharp and arbitrary line that slashes through the desert, restraining the surging city behind it to the south. There is almost nothing Soledad can see on the northern side of that line — perhaps there really isn’t anything over there, or perhaps whatever’s there is hidden by the buckles and folds of the landscape. On her third trip down the hill, she goes a little farther and finds a remarkable place where the landscape funnels into itself. There’s a bald patch of dirt beside the road, and a little berm built up there that looks like a ramp.”