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 ... Castillo shares with lyrical prose his family’s experience of hiding in plain sight and continually being separated by internal and external forces. He carefully balances multiple timelines, sweeping readers back and forth between past and present ... Castillo gets us so close to the struggle of living without a home and a fluctuating identity that he achieves a universal truth in his private experience ... Another one of Castillo’s gifts, along with sliding readers into his life with a selfless touch, is his ability to enter another’s perspective ... Castillo writes missing pages of humanity into the history books of immigration.

...a harrowing, heartfelt memoir about life in the interstitial spaces between countries, languages, cultures and identities ... The beauty of Children of the Land is that it’s a unique, personal narrative that is also universal. Hernandez Castillo writes candidly about his struggle to get a green card, the process of learning to cope with perpetual displacement ... This memoir is as timely as it is uncomfortable to read. Hernandez Castillo places readers on unstable ground and keeps them there. He writes bluntly and poetically ... Children of the Land bravely and honestly illuminates a world rarely written about with such liveliness.

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 ... is only one man’s voice, yet it amplifies the struggles and dilemmas that countless others have endured and will continue to endure, particularly during today’s political climate of animosity against migrants ... In this courageous memoir, Castillo lays bare his emotional truths with remarkable intimacy and insight. Ever the poet, Castillo can’t resist a lyrical stroke here and there.

...flawed but deeply compelling ... Castillo’s Children has the much sharper ring of lived experience ... A profound sense of disconnection follows him on both sides of the border; as do his struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, substance abuse, and estrangement from his father ... B+.

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 makes painfully clear the indispensable arrangement many immigrants must submit to, in order to navigate the legal apparatus of the state ... Castillo composes sentences that might as well be poetry, locating heart-wrenching metaphors and arresting images ... These lyrical elements translate the frustrations and beauty of migratory life in the U.S. for audiences who may harbor serious misunderstandings about what it means to be undocumented ... While the majority of his memoir traces and retraces steps toward settlement, slowly approaching certainty and clarity, the last fifty pages of Castillo’s memoir rapidly accelerate, building momentum as an unforeseen sequence of events catapults the family into entirely unexpected directions. It’s a smart, propulsive turn at the end of a deeply meditative and prismatic memoir, one that launches the reader into a quickly compressing present, even as the unsettled legacy of the family looms heavy on the mind.

Castillo movingly recounts his family’s history ... poetic language ... The narrative sometimes takes peculiar tangents — a digression on the protocol of late-night talk shows is especially odd — but most of this book offers a bracing reminder of the difficulties faced by immigrant families. Castillo writes one indelible scene after another.

... an intimate and lyrical memoir that unfolds against the backdrop of the American border crisis ... Within each movement, the writer arranges vignettes in fragments that cross time and space, creating a sense of constant motion that lays out the complex and rich tapestry of his history. This form serves as a way of both enacting the fragmentation of displacement while also allowing the writer to tap into his prowess as a prize-winning poet, capturing details in a way only a poet’s eye can see ... The placement of the vignettes within each movement is both powerful and artful: playing with the boundaries of time allows the author to show how certain histories in his family have repeated themselves ... Some sections read as prose poetry, stunning in their imagery and language ... Other sections, small history lessons, show how the immigration policies of the United States have affected and transformed his family. Together, these vignettes hold a conversation, creating a song that reveals the writer’s most intimate moments, the thread of his family’s displacement coloring every scene ... Hernandez Castillo gives us access to some of the most vulnerable moments of his life in this memoir ... as much a story about living undocumented in the United States as it is about the relationship between Hernandez Castillo and his father, one that was already fraught with tension before deportation widened their divide ... This is not the voyeuristic, intrusive look into the life of an undocumented person some readers might be looking for. Rather, it is a memoir told by a poet, one in which the writer finally has the freedom to speak on his history, and with it, the agency to choose which parts of the story to share and which to withhold ... More than a longing for an origin story, Hernandez Castillo’s memoir is an attempt to bring the invisible to light. This book examines what it means to belong to a nation, to a family, to a body, in a new perspective and voice that has been missing from this conversation ... Perhaps one of the deepest effects of this book is the chilling way the border itself lingers throughout its pages. Children of the Land shows how our southern border, both the physical thing itself and what it represents to millions of people, encroaches on so many aspects of a person’s life.

All questions of authenticity or appropriation disappear on the first page of Hernandez Castillo’s powerful memoir ... Castillo makes it very clear that if someone is undocumented, he or she must live with the fear of being watched ... There has been a fair amount of important discussion recently about the stories of immigration across the southern border, about how those stories should be told and who should tell them. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land should be at the center of that conversation.

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 ... In large part an attempt to answer the question of how to create a landscape of memories divorced from spectacle, this inventively rendered memoir provides an intimate, important look at the immigrant experience, family and intergenerational trauma, and coping with the ongoing presence of uncertainty in one's 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 ... Honest and unsparing, this book offers a detailed look at the dehumanizing immigration system that shattered the author’s family while offering a glimpse into his own deeply conflicted sense of what it means to live the so-called American dream. A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.

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 ... Castillo writes with disturbing candor, depicting the all-too-common plight of undocumented immigrants to the U.S.