The early praise gave way to a flood of criticism: Thousands of articles and tweets took issue with the author’s identity, the book itself, and, crucially, a massive marketing push that was viewed as tasteless and misleading. In an essay for Tropics of Meta, an academic blog, she described it as shallow and full of harmful stereotypes and accused the author, Jeanine Cummins, a white woman, of writing “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf.” Many agreed. The novelist Don Winslow called it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times.” Oprah, who picked it for her book club, wrote, “This story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant.” Gurba, who is Mexican American, saw it differently. Prominent readers had praised it in terms worthy of a Nobel Prize. In the months leading up to American Dirt’s publication, Macmillan had positioned the page-turner - about a mother and son escaping cartel violence in Mexico - as a definitive chronicle of the migrant experience. “I wouldn’t eat the sandwiches,” recalled Myriam Gurba, one of the activists. A representative of Oprah Winfrey’s listened in on the phone, and a platter of sandwiches sat on the table. Facing them was a collection of white editors and executives from Macmillan, the publishing house that had recently put out American Dirt, the most controversial book of the year, or maybe the century. Four Latinx writers and activists sat on one side of a long conference table. On a mild Monday this past February, a tense meeting unfolded in a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan.
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