suffers temporary stress-induced blindness, which left him unable to see. “Soon we would be crossing,” Hernandez-Castillo writes, “Soon we would want no one else to see us.” This memory of blindness at the crossing also reads like a myth or legend. The boy was afraid to be seen. He wished so hard to be invisible, that he became blind. The narrator’s vision returns shortly after crossing, but he remains unseen: “When I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility. Every act of living had been an act of trying to remain visible. I was negotiating a simultaneous absence and presence that was begun by the act of my displacement: I am trying to dissect the moment of my erasure.” This last phrase, borrowed from poet Wendy Xu, is repeated throughout the book. It is a declaration, but as a reader it provoked me to ask a few questions: Is erasure something noticeable? What if it is faint and imperceptible? Does an exact moment of our erasure actually exist?

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Erasure is marked by a spot or mark after erasing. There is always a trace left of what was originally there. Perhaps the narrator’s impulse to find and dissect the exact moments of his erasure is to find out what used to be. By finding the exact moment of his erasure, he can find what was removed and attempt to reconstruct who he was, who he could have been had it not been taken away.

Erasure is intimately linked to the lived experiences of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Fear of deportation is one of the ways erasure manifests in undocumented folk’s lives, and it is one of the emotions present in Children of the Land. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s memoir opens with a scene in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents enter the main character’s family’s home. The agents show him an outdated picture of Hernandez Castillo’s father’s face. Is Marcelo Hernandez here? They ask. The agents storm in, but they don’t find his father, who was deported three years prior. 

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“There was already nothing left of him in the house except for some old tools in the garage and the dip on his side of the bed, the outline of his absence weathered beneath the weight of his stillness over the years. Beyond that, all that remained was the likeness of my gestures to his, the way I carried my body, the way my mother said I chewed my food. Even his spare toothbrush had been thrown away long ago. One day it was there and another it wasn’t.”

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His father was deported, but he couldn’t be completely erased. There are traces of him in the bedroom, in the garage, traces of him in the way his son chewed his food.  

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The purpose of deportation is to remove the bodies of immigrants. Deportations operate under the discourse of citizenship. As a legal or social status, citizenship promises safety and protection, an assurance of selfhood and belonging that cannot be taken away. In many cases, citizenship papers become the ultimate goal for undocumented people. Allies, movements, and organizations make status and documentation their call to action. Yet, as several undocumented rights activists have pointed out, there is a contradiction in that demand. Undocumented poet and activist Yosimar Reyes explains: “In the past, we have always been the subject matter of citizens. Our lives have always been edited with a citizen gaze to create a call to action,” the new call to actions is “to look within yourself and ask, are there more sacred things than papers?”

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Erasure is targeted collective indifference. It is dismissing inconvenient facts, like the struggles migrants face in their countries of birth. It is turning a blind eye to the United States’ role in said struggles. It is ignoring how many undocumented immigrants suffer from lack of access to social services and health care. It is knowing that families are separated, that children venture into the desert alone. It is benefiting from the labor of undocumented immigrants and pretending they are not here when times get rough. This is the side of erasure that is in the hands of citizens to change.  This is the type of labor that requires a call to action. For undocumented folks, however, the plight against erasure is an emotional battle. There are, of course, tangible, everyday troubles that need to be taken care of, but there is also an inner struggle. If there is anything that one can learn from Children of the Land is that we owe undocumented folks the time and resources to heal. How deep does erasure go?  What are its effects? 

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I was fourteen when my family migrated to the United States. Our tourists visas expired but we remained, and we became undocumented. Life went on back home: my friends had their quinceañeras, my cousins had babies. My paternal grandmother passed away. I wanted to return, but I knew that if I went back to Argentina, I would not be allowed back into the U.S. It was like being tied down by an invisible ball and chain. I wanted to be a writer someday, which got me to thinking: is my experience worth writing about? When I searched the public library for stories of undocumented people I found none. Back then, I believed that only superior stories belonged in books and in literature. I thought that if a story was not represented in literature, then it had no true artistic merit. When I did not find stories about undocumented people, it felt like someone was sending me a message. My experience and those of other undocumented immigrants were not noteworthy. 

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For many years, I did not question that idea. I thought our stories belonged in documents and files in administration buildings. That was the place for our stories, not libraries.  

In my High School Honors English class, we were assigned a book that took place in Topanga Canyon. My school was 80% Latinx and it sat on the corner of Vanowen and Topanga Canyon Boulevard. When our teacher passed out the paperback copies, my heart beat fast. Inside these pages, was the first undocumented character I’d ever read in a book. I can imagine why our teacher assigned us to read The Tortilla Curtain. It was sold as a social novel, its setting was close to home. But that semester, a classroom full of mostly Latinx students read about their community for the first time, and they did not see themselves in it. Still, most of us learned a valuable lesson: erasure is also when someone else gets to tell your story. 

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Some may be tempted to say Hernandez Castillo’s memoir was written to help citizens understand the struggles of immigrants. They may add that its biggest impact is on mainstream U.S. audiences, that it will urge more U.S. citizens to speak up against anti-immigrant policies. This book may reach those audiences, but I believe the biggest impact of a book like Children of the Land is on the community of young undocumented people who will read it. Many of these young people may be reading about a main character who is undocumented in Hernandez Castillo’s Memoir for the first time. They will encounter ample physical and metaphorical spaces that assimilate their own, and will soak in the intimacy of familiar scenes. They may recognize conflicts, desires, and emotions similar to the ones they and their loved ones experience. They will be seen and will see themselves in a work of literature.