Copyright Date:
2024
Edition Date:
2024
Release Date:
01/19/24
Illustrator:
Garza, Oscar
Pages:
1 volume (unpaged)
ISBN:
0-8142-5895-6
ISBN 13:
978-0-8142-5895-8
Dewey:
Fic
LCCN:
2023031777
Dimensions:
27 cm.
Subject Heading:
Hispanic American children. Mexican-American Border Region. Comic books, strips, etc.
Hispanic American young adults. Mexican-American Border Region. Comic books, strips, etc.
Hispanic Americans. Fiction.
Immigration. Fiction.
Mexican-American Border Region. Social conditions. Comic books, strips, etc.
Mexican-American Border Region. Social life and customs. Comic books, strips, etc.
Mexico. Emigration and immigration. Comic books, strips, etc.
Mexican-American Border Region. Fiction.
Language:
English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews
Latinx youths experience the violence and trauma of politics, dehumanization, self-hatred, racism, and illness in stories set along the southern U.S. border.This multiethnic collection featuring people from Guatemala, Mexico, the United States, and another unnamed country is enhanced by the effective use of colors combined with stark black-and-white imagery. The artwork includes some full-page panels with benday dots that appear at the end of stories, depicting a significant moment, as well as black gutters, and pages without panels that have black backgrounds. The palette creates a sense of foreboding as families head toward border separation, detention, and other tragedies. In the story of Alicia Xóchitl Arai, a Japanese Mexican teen social media influencer who moved to San Ysidro, California, six years earlier, the color scheme fittingly makes use of Instagram's tropical sunset colors. "El Celso" follows a queer boy whose story ends in tragedy, "Alberto" spotlights a Mexico-born Border Patrol agent who projects his internalized hatred onto others, while "Rocky" shares the perspective of a "white dude who hates the world." English and Spanish are interwoven in most of the entries. Despite the social significance of the stories' perspectives and their context within the many manifestations of border struggles, their brevity stifles their own potential for greater emotional resonance and impact on readers.Visually effective and necessarily disturbing and difficult as it sheds light on inhumanity. (Graphic fiction. 13-18)
Through Fences follows the ups and downs of Latino kids and young adults in the US-Mexico borderlands: San Ysidro, Calexico, McAllen, and back and forth across the border. A young girl's journey north goes wrong, and now she is in a forbidding new place, away from her parents and brother, where she doesn't understand what the adults in green are saying even as she tries to obey their rules. Rocky, one of the few white kids in town, stands by and watches as Miguel is jumped by two of his friends. Maggie and her parents are separated at the border in a tragic accident. Alberto's son doesn't understand his Mexican father's hatred for "illegals" or his work as a border patrol agent. Alicia is a TikTok influencer who doesn't want to grow up to be a hospital cleaning lady like her mother, but COVID complicates things. Whatever their challenges, the kids, teens, tweens, and adults in these pages are just trying to survive their everyday lives. Vibrantly illustrated by Oscar Garza, each of these short stories brings a different perspective on the perils of living on the border while brown.