By Miriam R. Kramer American Dirt Recently Oprah Winfrey and Barnes & Noble Bookstores selected the book American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, a novel about migrants trying to make their way to a new life in the United States, as a timely choice for their respective book clubs. In doing so they unwittingly made a controversial choice. Many Latinx writers protested the pick, with several accusing the white writer of spreading stereotypes about Mexicans and other Central Americans while attempting to write a story that was not hers to write. As pundits and other cultural figures argued about the story, Cummins’ book tour was canceled because of threats of violence. This tumult raised the book’s profile but also obscured what she wrote: a profound and moving work about maternal love, human resilience, and the evil and kindness that emerge during the worst of human circumstances. Her story about migrants searching for the best among terrible choices gives names, faces, and humanity to the brown hordes clamoring for a piece of the North American dream at the border to el norte. American Dirt sprints off the starting line as a middle-class Mexican mother, Lydia, and her son, Luca, hide in a bathroom when bullets start flying at a family birthday party in Acapulco. Emerging to find their extended family killed, along with their husband and father, Sebastián, Lydia finds a note pinned to her husband. It says “My whole family is dead because of me.” As a journalist writing about the cartels, Sebastián has penned a locally published profile of local kingpin Javier Crespo Fuentes, known as La Lechuza (The Owl), the head of the cartel Los Jardineros. Before knowing who he was, Lydia had befriended La Lechuza at the bookstore she owns, growing close to him because of their…