Children of the Land, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Children of the Land, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
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Children of the Land

Author: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Narrator: Timothy Andrés Pabon

Unabridged: 10 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 01/28/2020


Synopsis

An Entertainment Weekly Most Anticipated Book of 2020
This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. 

“You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story.”When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary.With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor.Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.

About Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Norther California Book Award and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. He lives in Marysville, California where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Karen (idleutopia_reads) on January 23, 2020

A boy almost loses his life when a horse is startled, a man discovers he is bisexual long after marrying his high school sweetheart, a man wishes to wait a while before getting his papers because he is afraid that people will think he only married his love to fix his immigration status, a boy’s drea......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on December 22, 2020

In this raw and poetic memoir, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo shares about growing up undocumented in the United States and the ways in which abusive, xenophobic policy tore his family apart. I most appreciated the vividness and vulnerability in which he wrote about his parents. When describing how he w......more

Goodreads review by BookNightOwl on April 30, 2020

Highly recommend! Lyrically beautiful 💕......more

Goodreads review by Yesenia on July 25, 2020

I wanted to love this book due to the subject at hand but aside from it being a little tinsy winsy bit poetic it is just way too long and dragged out in my opinion.......more

Goodreads review by BookOfCinz on March 25, 2020

Deeply moving memoir about what it is like to live in America undocumented. In Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land he details his family crossing over from Mexico into the US undocumented. He gives an unflinching look into what life is like living in America undocumented. The Casti......more