David Bowles, "American Dirt is Proof that the Publishing Industry is Broken, New York Times, January 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/american-dirt-book.html
The white saviorism is tough for me to swallow, and not just because I’m a Chicano writer critical of “American Dirt.” My hometown library was chosen in late 2019 to be part of a pilot partnership between Oprah’s Book Club, the American Library Association and local library book groups. The libraries would receive several boxes of books to use with patrons in their book club, as well as other discussion and promotional materials.
Last week I was in touch with Kate Horan, the director of the McAllen Public Library here, via phone and email. She told me she felt “excited and honored” by the news, “proud that our library on the border with Mexico was recognized and selected to be part of a new initiative.”
No one at the library knew which book had been selected: Ms. Winfrey keeps titles a tightly guarded secret. But Ms. Horan was told that it would be “the most talked about book of the year.” Instructions were given: Upon arrival of the shipment, the library should film an “unboxing” video and submit it to Ms. Winfrey.
The boxes arrived on Jan. 17. Upon opening them, Ms. Horan said, her “heart sank,” and she immediately recoiled at this “deliberate assumption that libraries on the border, who were selected to receive the books, would be automatic endorsers, given the subject matter.”
She sent the unboxing video off, and after two agonizing days consulting with her predominantly Latinx staff and others, she decided to send the books back, and politely declined to participate in the pilot program.
COMMENT
This is a sticky issue and not as simple as the op-ed writer wants it to be. Accusations of "cultural appropriation" seem to me to be a red herring. The real problem with the "American Dirt" seems to be that it has been heavily marketed as your next book club read yet according to to the critics (who all dutifully reviewed it), it's not actually very well researched or written.
In many of the library stories I've collected on this blog, readers describe a transformative experience of finding people like themselves in the pages of library books. It's a reasonable guess that people in the U.S. borderlands might enjoy reading a novel located there. At the same time, I remember hearing a librarian complain that when she gathered books for imprisoned black men people would donate "Black Like Me," which is actually an autobiography about a white man traveling through the South in blackface, albeit with an intention for the reader to develop empathy for "the other." The publishers who promoted "American Dirt" similarly thought the novel might promote white empathy by focusing on a Mexican woman who is a lot like a middle class white American woman. The virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the Trump administration suggests that now might be the right moment for such a novel. Positive reviews on Amazon.com indicate that it might even be successful in generating empathy for migrants.
Should the librarian have sent the books back? I assume that the library does offer "American Dirt" for anyone who wants to borrow it. It's certainly not censorship to pick a different book for a book club. I agree with the op-ed, though, that the misstep reveals a big problem with centralized book publishing and library acquisitions. The publisher's marketing division, Oprah's Book Club and ALA missed the mark largely because nobody working there stopped to think that Latinx readers were never the target audience for this book. In fact, it seems unlikely that Oprah (a Black woman originally from Mississippi) is ever going to develop a reading list that is particularly sensitive to U.S. borderlands readers. The reaction of Latinx library staff suggest that they would really love to have a book club that highlights their own region, featuring people and situations that are more like their own experience instead of getting stereotyped by someone far away. That's exactly why libraries need to pick their own books instead of outsourcing those decisions.
I've actually written an article about this: "Re-Localizing the Library: Considerations for the Anthropocene.
