When I picked up Children of the Land, I knew to expect a book both poignant and painful, riddled with the traumas of the undocumented experience. I knew Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s mother, for example, had experienced domestic violence at the hands of his father. I knew that same father would be deported and eventually kidnapped by the cartels. I expected a critical analysis of the undocumented condition. Hernandez Castillo is a prominent activist and undocumented figure, advocating for undocumented students on college campuses and nationwide with his UndocuPoets campaign. My first year of grad school, I organized to have him visit Indiana University. His work inspired my own work supporting undocumented communities in Bloomington, Indiana and led to some meaningful changes in the Indiana University system. In his poetry, Hernandez Castillo excels at lyric confessionalism dense with enigmatic imagery. This is the mountain of expectation I brought to Hernandez Castillo’s work.
His memoir surprised and crushed me in other ways, however. Gone is Hernandez Castillo’s suffocatingly tender lyric surrealism. In its stead, we have a raw and bare-boned testimonio style voice, patiently yet bitterly detailing the ways the undocumented condition of his family shaped their histories in ways that are unavoidably tragic, even if overcome. His memoir becomes a testament to all that human beings can survive, sort of. This is not a feel-good story of immigrants overcoming against all odds. Hernandez Castillo excruciatingly details the ways the immigration system with its panopticon of laws and its irrational processes fucks up your self-image, fucks up your family, fucks up your relationships. Hernandez Castillo’s willingness to make his own neuroses and shortcomings bare were uncomfortable to read. Take for example Hernandez Castillo’s survivors’s’ guilt. It becomes so burdensome that halfway through the book he describes feeling guilty taking showers because migrants crossing the border do not have water. There are moments like this throughout the book, where we witness just how deep the trauma of our immigration system can dig its nails into the human psyche.
Especially compared to his poetry, the memoir is extremely accessible. He even took the time to translate basic Spanish, like mijo, into English. For these reasons, I hope this book becomes a must-read for those unfamiliar with the struggles of the undocumented community. As someone with undocumented people in my family, as someone who studied and worked beside undocumented students, I was not surprised by anything in the memoir. This disappointed me at first. But in time, I came to accept the book’s need to narrate its story. Stories like Marcelo’s are essential to scribe out in excruciating detail if this country will ever come to terms with all the wrongs of its immigration system.
While Yosimar Reyes uplifts the undocumented community by promoting UndocuJoy, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo does the necessary work of documenting the pain. While art is frequently given the role of healing oppressed communities, Hernandez Castillo narrates a story where healing does not seem possible, especially not in a neat or clean way. What is the role of art in the face of irreversible trauma then? Perhaps to show what a worthwhile life can look like when common notions of healing are impossible.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in memoir, the undocumented condition, queer and Latinx literature.