Reviews with content warning for Kidnapping - Children of the Land

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Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

3 reviews

yourbookishbff's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

Children of the Land, by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, is a memoir written by a poet, and this will likely determine if it’s a story you’ll want to pick up. It is never linear, it is painful and unresolved, a memory of him at five years old huddled under a tractor in the desert near the border will have as much page time as this sentence. He will never call his siblings “my sister” or “my brother” and you will never understand why. He will not filter out his trauma for you - in his own words, he may be embarrassed, but he’s not ashamed - and he will not answer the questions he asks. It’s a challenging read in content and structure, and so intimate that at times I felt I should walk away, that my presence during his pain could only be voyeuristic. “No one in this story is a ghost. This is not a story.”

Castillo’s story is one I always felt I understood factually - he is about my age, lived in the U.S. without papers for his entire childhood after crossing the border with his parents and six siblings at five years old, avoided deportation with his father because of DACA (Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals) and suffered multiple family separations. When we all chanted “families belong together” and protested cages for children in 2018, I really thought I understood stories like Castillo’s. Reading a memoir like this makes you realize that, for those of us who have never lived through an ICE raid, understanding is impossible - but we are called to witness. The layered traumas of displacement, separation, surveillance and xenophobia, contrasted to the endless bureaucracy of immigration policy and enforcement, are brutally exposed, and the ripples of every single denial feel overwhelming, even to the reader.

I listened to this on audio, and while I loved the narration and recommend the format, I did find it helpful to orient myself with a digital copy, because the structure is, again, non-linear and I needed to visualize the stops and starts to understand how the story was being told.

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skitch41's review against another edition

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challenging reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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serendipitysbooks's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

4.0

Children of the Land is a heartbreaking memoir highlighting the very real toll that the immigration process takes. So often the focus is on the journey over the border, yet in many ways that is just a small part of the overall process. In this memoir the author shares his experience, which involved crossing the border from Mexico with his family when he was 5, desperately trying to live below the radar and not attract any attention lest the family’s undocumented status be discovered, seeing his father be deported, experiencing the reality of living as a divided family with members on both sides of the border, and then the seemingly unending struggle to obtain the desired visas so their presence in the country became legal. The emotional and mental toll is immense and some of that can be seen in anger management problems, relationship struggles, mental health issues and addiction. The book unfolds in a series of shortish fragments that alternate between past and present. I thought the structure really reflected the author’s reality of feeling fragmented, as if he belonged in neither Mexico or the United States, and of being unable to fully live his life or plan ahead, constantly waiting for immigration decisions which often felt arbitrary, capricious and lacking in humanity.

An eye opening read spotlighting the messy reality for many migrants.

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