Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Jeanine Cummins "American Dirt" first trip to Mexico, Mexican border - Hilarious lies! - by Mary Cummins (NO RELATION!)

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Below is from a Q & E with Cummins from January 14, 2020. I hope this is just more lying otherwise this is really pathetic. For anyone who has ever driven from San Diego to the border at any time you can tell this is a story. I've been going there since I was a newborn up to just a few years ago. The first time I remember driving over the border I was seven in 1972. There have always been many HUGE signs saying you are approaching the border for miles before you get there even back in 1972.

Tijuana is 20 miles south of San Diego. You take the 805 to the 5 and hit the border check point. You would have to drive a long way around the check point to find an open place with no auto blocks to just drive across accidentally. A sane person would have parked on the US side then walked to the border over the bridge. There's parking there for this purpose. When she saw Mexicans selling chicle, pinatas she should have realized she was in Mexico.

Bookselling This Week: Where did the idea for this book come from?

"Jeanine Cummins: The first moment I felt like I should write about this happened many, many years ago, when my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, and I were vacationing in California. We had taken the week to drive the Pacific Coast Highway and our last stop was San Diego, and one day I drove down to the border by myself. My husband was an undocumented immigrant and I didn’t want him anywhere near the border, but I wanted to go and just see it. And I accidentally drove into Mexico, which you could still do then. It was pre-9/11 and the border was not militarized the way it is now.

I’d been to Mexico before, but I’d never been to the border. I was so shocked by what I saw there. There were so many young men with only one leg. There were young kids trying to sell gum or hats or piñatas or whatever touristy stuff they had to sell. I had no money because as soon as I got there, I got pulled over by the policía and they took it all. The fine print on my rental agreement said I couldn’t have the car I was driving in Mexico, and the officer said he would impound the car and I would have to wait in jail for a few days to talk to the judge. I was 21 or 22 (that would be 1995 before she met her husband when she was still in college in Maryland), and I was terrified. I said I couldn’t go to prison (soooo dramatic! that's not how it works), and he said, well, maybe there’s another way. You can pay a fine. And I said, how much is the fine? And he said, how much you got?

I gave him all my money, and then I waited five hours in line to get through U.S. Customs and Border Protection to get back into the United States. After crossing accidentally in seven seconds (HUGE lie). So, I was sitting at the border for many, many hours, just observing all these young kids, and I must have seen five for six young men with only one leg. And I didn’t understand what I was looking at. When I got home to New York, I started researching. I came across “La Bestia,” and I came to understand that these were men from Central America and southern Mexico who had, in all likelihood, ridden the train to the border and had fallen off at some point and been maimed. I came to understand how common this was, that it’s happening every single day. In the effort to just reach the U.S. border, never mind cross it, people are being killed and maimed daily. It’s commonplace. And I was like, why don’t I know about this? Why don’t people in the U.S. know this story?

I never stopped thinking about that, and for many years, I felt an enormous reluctance to write about it. I felt, very clearly, that it just wasn’t my story to tell. And even when I started thinking about writing about the border, I resisted writing from a migrant’s point of view for a long time. But if I really wanted to get into it, then the correct thing to do was to tell the story of the people who were suffering."

Cummins previously wrote a book about the potato famine. She was asked why she wrote that book. She replied "people starved during the potato famine. Not many people know about this. I have to educate people about this." Everyone knows about the potato famine. It's part of history class. This woman needs to go back to bar tending.

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The below pic is 1970 at the border. There were still signs on the freeway saying you're going to Mexico. There is no way you just accidentally drive over.

1970 at Mexico border San Diego. Huge signs even back then. You don't accidentally drive across the border. You'd have to be blind or drunk to do that. 


Mary Cummins of Animal Advocates is a wildlife rehabilitator licensed by the California Department of Fish and Game. Mary Cummins is also a licensed real estate appraiser in Los Angeles, California.

Mary Cummins, Mary K. Cummins, Mary Katherine Cummins, Mary Cummins-Cobb, Mary, Cummins, Cobb, real estate, appraiser, appraisal, instructor, teacher, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Brentwood, Bel Air, California, licensed, permitted, single family, condo, pud, hud, fannie mae, freddie mac, uspap, certified, residential, certified resident, apartment building, multi-family, commercial, industrial, expert witness, civil, criminal, orea, dre, insurance, bonded, experienced, bilingual, spanish, english, form, 1004, 2055, land, raw, acreage, vacant, insurance, cost, income approach, market analysis, comparative, theory, appraisal theory, cost approach, sales, matched pairs, plot, plat, map, diagram, photo, photographs, photography, rear, front, street, subject, comparable, sold, listed, active, pending, expired, cancelled, listing, mls, multiple listing service, claw, themls,
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