Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's Children of the Land Reviewed by Rigoberto González

Rigoberto González reviews Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's Children of the Land (Harper, 2020), the title of which was borrowed "from a legend [Castillo] learns from Mexican laborers returning from the U.S. to their homeland," for the LA Times. More:

...They talked of “Los Niños de la Tierra,” apparitions rumored to haunt the mountainside, their stares capable of causing blindness. Castillo, however, casts these ghosts in a more sympathetic light when he wonders, “Maybe those children belonged to someone, trapped in the north like everyone else, unable to return to the land of their birth.”

In his version, Los Niños de la Tierra open our eyes to see the immigrant’s predicament more clearly.

“When I came undocumented to the U.S. [at age 5], I crossed into a threshold of invisibility,” he writes.

Indeed, his family settles in Northern California but feels doomed to a life of constant anxiety. A clandestine existence means keeping window curtains and mouths closed, avoiding being noticed altogether. Their fear of drawing attention is so great that when the teenage Castillo is struck by a car, he begs the EMTs for his immediate release. Later, as he recovers in the hospital, his mother declines to press charges to avoid becoming entangled with the law, but also because, as an unauthorized resident, she doesn’t think it’s her right...

Read on at the LA Times.