Mexican WhiteBoy (review)

Danny Lopez has been raised by his Anglo mother on her own ever since she divorced his Mexican father when he and his sister were little. Mixed heritage hasn’t been easy on him, particularly since his school baseball team has shut him out of prime playing time, a blatant but unprovable act of anti-Mexican prejudice. When Danny gets his mom to agree to send him for the summer to the border town where his dad’s relatives live, they’re happy to take him in, and he’s happy to get a chance to be Mexican. He quickly discovers, though, that he can’t simply flip some Mexican switch and fit right in with the extended family: he’s lighter skinned and better educated, he speaks poor Spanish, and he knows nothing of the teen culture in which his cousins live. A violent introductory clash with Uno—a half-black, half-Mexican neighborhood teen with identity issues of his own—segues from a vicious baseball rivalry into a friendship that could bring each of them closer to his personal dream of reuniting with an errant father. Readers will sense all along that there’s more to their family stories than Danny and Uno suspect, but while they wait for the two very different but equally realistic resolutions to play out, de la Peña keeps the chronicle of a summer’s worth of parties, romances, scheming, and hustles immediate and engrossing. YAs who find Hijuelos’ Dark Dude (reviewed below) a little too generation-bound will appreciate this edgier, more contemporary take on the same theme.