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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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Deportation, Drug use, Alcoholism, Car accident, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Medical trauma, Alcohol, and Xenophobia
Moderate: Abandonment, Trafficking, Vomit, Child abuse, Child death, Biphobia, Cursing, Confinement, Kidnapping, Panic attacks/disorders, Pregnancy, and Suicidal thoughts
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