Module 5: Esperanza Rising

Book Summary:  Esperanza and her mother were forced to leave their home of riches and luxury in Mexico after her father died.  They went to work in migrant labor camps in California just before the great depression.  Her mother becomes very ill and Esperanza has to pull from her great inner strength.  She never regains all of her material riches, but she has many family and friends. 

My Impressions:   Esperanza Rising was a touching story about a young girl who went from being the daughter of a rich and powerful family in Mexico to a migrant worker in California. This book has won a variety of awards including the Pura Belpre award because once you start reading you get caught up in the story and it is difficult to put down. It is a very well written novel that shows how many hispanics lived on both sides of the Rio Grande River.

Professional Review:  At times Esperanza Rising, although it takes place in Depression-era Mexico and the United States instead of Victorian England, seems a dead ringer for Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. Both are dramatic riches-to-rags stories about girls forced to trade fancy dolls and dresses for hard work and ill-fitting hand-me-downs after their beloved fathers die. Thirteen-year-old Esperanza even possesses a touch of Sara Crewe's romantic spirit. The daughter of an affluent Mexican rancher, she had been taught by her father to believe that the "land is alive," that she could lie down beneath the arbors in her family's vineyards, press her ear to the ground, and hear a heart beat. Yet can this still hold true for Esperanza when she no longer reigns as queen of the harvest but labors in the fields of a foreign country, picking grapes on someone else's land for pennies an hour? The transition does not come easily for her, and thus her story ultimately diverges from The Little Princess's fairytale script to become a poignant look at the realities of immigration. Political as well as personal history inform the sometimes florid narrative (loosely based, we are told in an afterword, on the experiences of the author's grandmother). Esperanza's struggles begin amidst class unrest in post-revolutionary Mexico and intersect with labor strikes in the United States, which serve to illustrate the time period's prevailing hostility toward people of Mexican descent. In one of the more glaring injustices she witnesses, striking workers, who were born American citizens and have never set foot on Mexican soil, are loaded onto buses for deportation. Through it all, Esperanza is transformed from a sheltered aristocrat into someone who can take care of herself and others. Although her material wealth is not restored in the end, the way it is for Sara Crewe, she is rich in family, friends, and esperanza--the Spanish word for hope. 

Library Uses:  This book allows many opportunities for curriculum support through the library.  The study of the Great Depression can be shared through the eyes of the Hispanic culture.  It would also be interesting to study what students learned about child labor in the migrant worker camps.  That could be extended through further research into many different writing methods.

Ryan Munoz, P.  (2000).  Esperanza rising. New York: Scholastic.

C.M.H. (2001, January). Book Review. [Review of the Book

Esperanza Rising, by P. Munoz Ryan].  The Horn Book Magazine 77 (1), p 96.