Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. 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 become invisible. 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 Hernandez 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. In Children of the Land (Harper Perennial) Hernandez Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. It 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. Author Sandra Cisneros praised Children of the Land as a “moving memoir [..] the document of a life without documents, of belonging to two countries yet belonging to neither. Hernandez Castillo has created his own papers fashioned from memory and poetry. His motherland is la madre tierra, his life a history lesson for our times.”