Children of the Land

Castillo grew up undocumented in California — his family crossing from Mexico when he was five, living for decades in the legal limbo of permanent uncertainty. This memoir traces his childhood, his parents' eventual deportation, his own path toward legal status through the Violence Against Women Act, and the psychological cost of spending your formative years knowing that your existence in the only country you've ever known is technically unauthorized. He is a MacArthur Fellow and writes with a poet's precision — every sentence doing exactly the work it needs to and no more. The most intimate and formally accomplished account of the undocumented experience available at this age and the one that most completely shows the human being inside the policy debate. Essential companion to The Devil's Highway on the adult shelf — that book shows the journey, this one shows what the arrival costs across a lifetime.