Cummins also cited Iglesias-Prieto on Wednesday when she was asked about the 'haterade' she was receiving on CBS This Morning Oprah, who was also a guest on the show, did not directly comment.īut the pitfalls of a non-Mexican writer telling the Mexican migrant story make themselves glaringly obvious to 'anyone who has spent significant time in Mexico,' wrote author and translator David Schmidt for The Blue Nib.

Cummins writes in her note that Norma Iglesias-Prieto, a professor of Chicano and Chicana studies at San Diego State University, assuaged her doubts about being the right author to tell the story. Importantly, American Dirt has received the blessing of a number of members of the Latinx community, including prior to its release.

Gurba noted in her blog post that while Cummins now identifies as Latinx due to her Puerto Rican grandmother, in a 2015 New York Times op-ed the author had labeled herself as white The Washington Post clarified Wednesday that Cummins grew up in Maryland and that her Irish roots were a particularly 'strong influence,' as she's lived in Belfast and 'her earliest works were set in Ireland.' Cummins, seemingly, was aware of the effort she would need to put in to write something like American Dirt, and she describes in her author's note how she 'traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands.'

Cummins' own identity is central to this controversy.

A million little pieces book scandal