'American Dirt' is a bestseller because it reflects guilty liberals' quiet beliefs about migrants

Even with (or perhaps because of) the publisher canceling book events amid claims of security concerns, even amid a barrage of criticism over the book's stereotypical portrayals of Mexicans, and despite calls by mostly Latino activists about the lack of diversity in publishing, Cummins' book has found its audience, and its audience is mostly white.That's because “American Dirt” tells the story of a middle-class Mexican woman and her son fleeing from a sensationalized narco-cartel massacre (that could be featured in a Trump rally speech) to the United States alongside Cummins' imagined "faceless brown mass." America's mostly white media gatekeepers have always believed that Americans can only feel empathy for nonwhite people if there's a nominally white character to show them how; they take as an article of faith that the problems of nonwhite people don’t feel real enough until the white saviors come swooping in and see those problems for themselves. (At least Mexican actor and naturalized American Selma Hayek admitted the latter bit after the fact.)In order to have white American readers embrace a novel about Not-Mexico written by a non-Mexican with the cooperation of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, one needs to make sure that there are enough nonwhite voices to vouch for its authentic Mexican-ness.But even with the marketing machine cranked up, the manufactured narrative of “American Dirt” as the Great American Immigrant Novel never fully took hold, because the people who widely noticed its existence first were Mexicans and Central Americans who, along with their other Latino allies, knew Mexico and the border area better than anybody else and recognized Cummins' Not-Mexico as a fundamentally conservative, white American construct.So when Cummins reminded the world that she identified as Puerto Rican last week during some early interviews about the controversy, her embrace of her Latinidad didn’t excuse her ignorance.