A 2020 International Latino Book Award FinalistsAn Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub 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.
An NPR Best Book of the YearA 2020 International Latino Book Award FinalistsAn Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year 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 existen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one in this story was a ghost.
You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you.
A 2020 International Latino Book Award FinalistsAn Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub 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
