A young Mexican boy meets an American school teacher. They reconnect years later as he is attempting to "jump" the border.
This story of an undocumented Mexican migrant grew out of my work as an English Literacy instructor. I began to realize that most Americans have no idea why anyone would cross the border without documentation, so I began interviewing people who had this history. I fictionalized their composite stories in order o keep the focus on this novel as a story and not as a political platform. My purpose is tell a true story and tell it well, and let the readers come away with their understandings. The book is in two parts: Part I follows Cesar as a ten-year-old meeting Trish the teacher and becoming friends with her as she gives him English lessons. Part II takes place 25 years later. In this section, Trish and Cesar begin to realize how similar are their family's stories of diaspora: Hers from the coal fields of Kentucky, and his from the played-out mining towns of central Mexico.
Excerpt
Cesar
That morning, it started the same as all the mornings.
“Buen dia, Gordita.”
I stopped and turned to look back through the doorway into my casita. The buckets for the water were hanging empty from both my hands because I had just started out the doorway when I heard the big voice of my abuelo. It was not to me he spoke so loud, but to my little cousin, the chubby niña who I knew prayed each night that the Virgin might bring a miracle of thinness to her while she slept. She had been trying to slip away like a brown mouse to make her morning pee, but our grandfather saw.
Good Day, Little Fat One!
This was why she was afraid of him.
Me, he ignored. He did not want to startle me away to one of my hiding places. My granny needed the water I would bring for the cooking of his breakfast.
All the days, I went early to the well to get water for making the breakfast. I did not sleep late in the bed filled with my brothers—brothers who turned and curled to their sides and made whimpering sounds like puppies if anyone shook them awake while an hour of good sleeping coolness still hung in Mexico’s summer air. I did not want to be in our bed when the waking and grumbling began. I wanted out of the bed and into the day with no one talking to me, except me to my own self.
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