Virtual Summer Book Club

S﻿ince its founding in 1938, the Greater Detroit Association ΦΒΚ has worked to create a strong network for Phi Beta Kappa members by hosting social and educational activities and exploring cultural offerings in our community. We also award scholarships annually to outstanding undergraduates in the Honors College at Wayne State University.

ΦΒΚ Greater Detroit Association

Please join PBK to discuss Children of the Land, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's story  of the sorrows and joys of life as an immigrant.

The Greater Detroit Association Phi Beta Kappa invites you to join our Virtual Summer Book Club meeting! Our book choice is Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, a poet, essayist, and immigration advocate who was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and immigrated at age five with his family to the California. Marcelo earned a BA at Sacramento State University, became the first undocumented student to complete an MFA at the University of Michigan, and has won various awards, such as the 2017 Drinking Gourd Poetry PrizeGoodreads adds the following about Children of the Land.“You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. 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. 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. 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. 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.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. 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.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.

NPR Interview of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo:https://www.npr.org/2020/01/25/799470733/marcelo-hernandez-castillo-on-children-of-the-land

After years of turmoil, ‘Dreamer’ and author Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is proud to put down California rootsDec. 8, 2020 12:25 PM PT (Los Angeles Times)Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of “Children of the Land.”(HarperCollins )Last month, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo bought a new couch. That might seem like a small thing, but it felt huge to the Yuba City, Calif.-based poet, whose lyrical memoir, “Children of the Land,” describes an upbringing lived in the shadows as part of a family of immigrants from Mexico.Growing up, “we never really tried to invest in nice things,” says Castillo, who joins the L.A. Times Book Club on Dec. 15. “The majority of our life was moving, moving, moving, moving, moving.”But at age 32, Castillo has settled down and planted roots in the Central Valley. With help from an Obama-era program for “Dreamers” who were brought to this country as children, Castillo was able to gain a foothold, earn two college degrees and eventually win a coveted green card: permanent residency status.He spent Thanksgiving week settling into a rented home with a yard he described as perfect for his family, including his wife, Rubi, 3-year-old son and a Shih Tzu-poodle mix named Kimchi. And for a crowning touch, they have that couch: “Not hand-me-down, not used, not from a thrift store, not gifted or all dilapidated, but a good quality, durable couch that will last me 10, 15 years.“It felt like a milestone in my life — almost on par with graduating from graduate school or from college,” he says. “I almost got weepy when I finally sat down. I mean, I’m renting this house, OK, but I own this couch.”To understand, consider the circumstances of his upbringing. Castillo was born in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, where his parents lived in a house with a dirt floor and a tarp roof. Eventually, they migrated to Northern California, where Castillo’s father sold fruit at flea markets and his mother worked in a fruit plant. Marcelo was 5 when his parents brought him across the border without a visa.It was a difficult life, marked by financial struggles, constant uprooting and fear of immigration raids. “Some people have enormous dreams,” Castillo said. “I wanted a boring life.”In 2003, when Castillo was 15, his father was deported, setting in motion much of the action described in the memoir.Castillo says his father was hard on the family, enforcing a code of machismo that extended to the clothes his children wore to school every day. No shorts or baggy pants were allowed — only fitted blue jeans with a belt and a tucked-in shirt, a rigid style out of touch with the times. Hair could be neither too long nor too short and had to be combed to one side. Sneakers were OK, but for reasons unknown, they could not be white. “If it was up to him, we would also be wearing cowboy hats to school,” Castillo writes.More frightening, he writes, were the episodes of anger, screaming fits and worse that left the family traumatized. When his father was deported, the family was broken, but his mother was relieved too. “Amá says that even though it was hard on us, I should be glad he was gone when and as long as he was, because otherwise I would have never left the fields or peach orchards,” Castillo writes. “His gift was precisely the absolute fact of his absence.”Still, after Castillo was approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) in 2013, he traveled to Mexico for a reunion with his father, their first meeting in 10 years. Despite their conflicts, Castillo worked tirelessly to win his father’s return to the United States, a grinding journey through the immigration bureaucracy. When the initial efforts failed, Castillo’s mother returned to Mexico in 2016, a decision the family now regards as a mistake. Eventually, Castillo and his family were able to get both parents back into the United States, where their applications for asylum status are still pending.After high school, Castillo got a degree from Sacramento State and went on to the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s in fine arts. His chapbook “Dulce” was favorably received, and he expanded it into a full-length book, “Cenzóntle” (Mockingbird), which won several awards, including a Golden Poppy from the California Independent Bookseller Alliance.After earning his MFA, Castillo returned to the Yuba City area and is now the distinguished visiting writer at St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga, where he teaches poetry. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University in Ohio; before the COVID-19 pandemic, he also taught incarcerated youth in a program organized by the Yuba Sutter Regional Arts Council in Marysville, Calif. With an eye toward helping other writers of similar background, he co-founded Undocupoets, which successfully advocated to remove citizenship requirements from many poetry prizes.In January, Castillo published “Children of the Land,” which Times reviewer Rigoberto González described as a “courageous” work: “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.”In the memoir, Castillo said he tried to combine the lyrical approach of his poetry with a more straightforward account of the obstacles and indignities his family faced. Short sections are labeled as musical “movements,” meditations on his state of mind and his family’s history. Longer, more prosaic sections detail efforts to win residency status for his family, with some of the accounts written almost contemporaneously as events unfolded in several journeys back and forth across the border.“With those sections, I felt like I didn’t have the luxury of being oblique or coded,” Castillo says. “I didn’t want to risk being misunderstood, because there were real consequences at hand.”For the same reason, he maintains the privacy of his family members, referring to his mother only as Amá and not naming his siblings.His mother, after her sojourn in Mexico, is back in Yuba City. While the asylum case is still up in the air, the family is more settled than it’s ever been, and Castillo says they no longer live with the constant, “debilitating fear” they had when he was younger. The endless cycle of moving seems to be over.

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Virtual Summer Book Club

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