Pam Munoz Ryan · 2000 · road
Pam Munoz Ryan's 2000 novel, based on her own grandmother. Esperanza Ortega is thirteen and lives on a ranch in Aguascalientes with servants and fine dresses, until her father is murdered by bandits and her uncle burns the house down - and she and her mother go north to a farm labour camp in California in the middle of the Depression.
- 1Aguascalientes
El Rancho de las Rosas, where Esperanza has never carried anything heavier than a doll. Her father is killed by bandits the day before her birthday, and Tio Luis makes her mother an offer: marry him, or lose everything.
- 2Zacatecas
They leave at night in a wagon under a false floor, with the servants who are going with them - a rich girl learning within a day that she is now travelling as poor people travel, and being seen as one.
- 3Mexicali
North by train through days of heat, sleeping sitting up among strangers, and across the border into a country where nobody will care who her family used to be - which is the whole education of the book.
- 4Arvin
A Mexican farm labour camp in the San Joaquin Valley: a cabin like a horse stall, sweeping a floor she cannot sweep, and her mother down with Valley Fever - and a strike coming that could take even this away.