It takes an intimate account like Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s memoir, Children of the Land, to refocus our attention on what matters when discussing immigration reform—i.e., the person and their family.

...a harrowing, heartfelt memoir about life in the interstitial spaces between countries, languages, cultures and identities.

The experience of being an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, written as a personal account, is seldom seen in American literature even though it is a reality for millions of Mexicans residing in the United States...The publication of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land is an excellent addition to this small but necessary body of work, underscoring the fact that in each such immigrant there’s a unique story that deserves to be heard.

...flawed but deeply compelling.

Castillo exposes the border, amnesty, and legal status for the societal constructs they are—malleable, impermanent, and imprecise. At its heart, Castillo’s memoir seeks to reveal the secret handshake accepted by the state for passage, the only currency it understands: evidence of suffering.

Castillo movingly recounts his family’s history.

... an intimate and lyrical memoir that unfolds against the backdrop of the American border crisis.

All questions of authenticity or appropriation disappear on the first page of Hernandez Castillo’s powerful memoir.

In short chapters traversing time and space, Castillo writes of his childhood as an undocumented immigrant before DACA was implemented, presenting a powerful, kaleidoscopic arrangement of history and thought. In the lead up to Castillo's own border crossings as an adult with green card status, readers meet multiple generations of his family. While the border is the site of recurring traumas, Castillo manages to draw uncanny powers of observation from its presence in his life.

Castillo uses his prodigious poetic craft to plumb each family member’s odyssey through the U.S. immigration system and its Kafkaesque and labyrinthine illogic and to describe the raw emotion and pain experienced while battering against the cold shoulder of bureaucracy and living under a cloud of uncertainty and fear. In the tortured dynamic that plays out in his cross-border family, Castillo lays bare the inherent unfairness and high psychological toll of the current immigration system on people in both the U.S. and Mexico..

In this emotionally raw memoir, Hernandez Castillo explores his family’s traumas through a fractured narrative that mirrors their own fragmentation.

Throughout, Castillo examines other borders and boundaries in his life, including being bisexual and bilingual. Additionally, he writes of the difficulties reconciling his professional achievements as a creative writing teacher with his family’s struggles.