In one way, Children of the Land is a classic immigrant narrative made new for the 21st century—and yet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's new memoir subverts expectations
was home watching television with his younger brothers when he heard a knock at the door, then another. When he opened the door, a man in a green ICE uniform pushed past. Four agents stepped inside; another five or so surrounded the house. They were looking, an agent said, for Marcelo Hernandez.
“There were moments when I didn’t need to tell my body how to move,” Hernandez Castillo writes in the first lines of his new memoir,. “Some deep-seated knowledge rose from the very core of me. But it wasn’t instinct. It was memory. I was tapping into an inheritance that up until that moment I didn’t know I had.”
But Hernandez Castillo—who shares a name with his father—did not move. Instead he stayed behind, to explain that the man the agents were looking for was not there. Three years earlier, the elder Marcelo Hernandez had packed his 1970s Ford pickup truck and driven from the Northern California home he shared with his wife and children, for what was supposed to have been a restorative trip back to his home state of Zacatecas, Mexico.
Yet in that opening scene and throughout the book, Hernandez Castillo continually subverts the idea thatthat the immigrant should only ever move in one direction, to a better place, a safer place, one more prosperous and secure. His parents, especially, are caught in that in-between place. In a constellated narrative divided into “movements” rather than chapters, Hernandez Castillo instead traces a lineage of back-and-forth, of in-between.speaking from his home outside Sacramento, California.
His experience at Michigan—where he received DACA status just in time to receive the work authorization necessary for his scholarship—led him and a few other undocumented writers around the country to begin organizing around an issue a U.S.-born writer wouldn’t think twice about. Young poets rely on first book prizes and contests for early publication and recognition, yet nearly all of them were open only to citizens or legal residents.
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