Illustration by Violet Reed for HuffPost

This article is the second in a series called How To Human , interviews with memoirists that explore how we tackle lifes alarms, marvels and bombshells. The first interview was with Ada Calhoun .

When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo crossed the border as a child with his family from Mexico to the United States, he experienced stress-induced blindness. Its a horrifying, parents-worst-nightmare detail that no one could possibly imagine without having known it.

Castillo weaves devastating details throughout his new memoir, Children of the Land , which publishes Tuesday from Harper. They are details that only a person who has lived without papers could know. Details like driving in a car with your mother and turning off the radio when a show about what happens to migrant bodies in the desert comes on. What its like to dive into the immigration system in search of a legal path to keep your mother in America, and get your father out of Mexico. What its like to be interviewed for a green card and have to prove your love for your partner. What its like to help your mother prepare to move back to Mexico to self-deport because that is the only way she can be reunited with her husband.

In writing from the heart of truth, Castillo paints an honest and nuanced portrait of the undocumented life. His memoir published weeks after American Dirt, a novel about a mother and her son fleeing Mexico after a drug cartel kills their family. It is written by Jeanine Cummins, a white woman, and was criticized by readers and the Latinx community for its cliched descriptions of Mexico. The book has created a debate over who gets to tell certain stories .

Castillo is also the author of Cenzontle , a collection of poetry. In an interview with HuffPost, he talks about his often painful writing process, and how he feels like his story, the immigrant story, has no ending.

The book is just so vivid and anchored in scene, just like a movie. Same with the action, the back and forth across the border, the waiting to hear from immigration. It creates this enormous tension for the reader. Is that something that you played with when you were writing it? That aspect of time and when to slow down and speed up, when to go back in time, when to stay in the present?

Being a poet really allowed me to move things around and not be faithful to a particular chronology. For me, that was far more interesting, because that is a more accurate representation of the undocumented experience. Youre not just living in the present; youre still living in the legacy of the past and the consequences of even things that happened, say, in 1916. Were still waiting or were still moving or were still doing this maddening back and forth that just seems to not end.

I love the historical re-creations you do for your grandfather, your great-grandfather and even when you are writing about your mothers ancestral home. Could you talk about the research you did for that and how you re-created those scenes?

I interviewed an uncle of mine whos in his late 80s who actually went through the whole process of delousing . I used documents that I found, too. They werent necessarily passports, but just little cards that said your name, the date, your physical features, occupation and port of entry and then the return. And I read a wonderful book by David Dorado Romo called Ringside Seat to a Revolution .

There are beautiful scenes in the book in which you describe the ruins of your mothers ancestral home. Did she tell you about it?

Ive always known about it because at family gatherings, I remember as a kid the only conversations were conversations about Mexico. Issues about land. Conversations about cattle. Conversations about who was where. Conversations about who died. It was always directed that way. I grew up almost having an idea of these places and of these homes and this landscape before I ever actually went back. After 21 years away, I ended up going back because of DACA. I was able to see firsthand the places that my mother was talking about. They were abandoned and in shambles.

Seeing it for myself, it was pretty devastating to see my mothers house the way it was. There was so much life, she explained, on that ranch, just how alive it was. How, with all of my aunts, their kids everywhere, the arroyo was still going. Its just a very picturesque, very beautiful, quiet place.