Harvest: We Are Here Because You Were There

"We are here because you were there." Juan González puts this on the first page of Harvest of Empire and doesn't let you look away. The United States funded the coup in Guatemala. It ran Cuba's economy until Batista made it impossible to stay. It backed Trujillo in the Dominican Republic for thirty years. It signed NAFTA and destroyed the Mexican corn market. It armed death squads in El Salvador. Then it built a wall and called what followed an immigration crisis. The crisis was the policy. The people who crossed were the consequence. The word "harvest" is González's own — a reckoning with what the United States planted in Latin America and what grew.

SEE THROUGH IT names the mechanism: Harvest of Empire traces each wave of Latinx migration in the United States back to a specific U.S. intervention, country by country, decade by decade, until the pattern is impossible to call coincidence. Then FEEL THE FISSURE puts one nine-year-old body inside that mechanism: Solito is the memoir Javier Zamora wrote of the crossing he made alone from El Salvador through Mexico, in the present tense, from inside that child's body — the people who became his family for two months in the desert, the terror and the tenderness of a journey U.S. Cold War policy made necessary. Sandra Cisneros refuses to let that weight crush the life out of the story. LAUGH & RESIST is Caramelo — a multigenerational Mexican American family saga told in interruptions, in gossip, in a grandmother who argues with the narrator from beyond the grave. The laugh is survival; the argument is about who gets to tell the family's history. Quiara Alegría Hudes closes in MAKE SOMETHING BETTER with the memoir of how she built In the Heights from a corner of North Philadelphia and the Puerto Rican aunts who taught her that art is what you make from what language can't hold.

Twenty-five years of U.S. immigration debate has never answered the question González asks on page one. These four books answer it for him.