Esperanza Rising, winner of the Pura Belpré award and numerous other distinctions, gives readers an inside look into life as a Mexican immigrant during the Great Depression. The book’s young heroine, Esperanza Ortega, flips stereotypes upside down by starting out as the daughter of a wealthy landowner who loses everything to tragedy and must then emigrate to escape further disaster. The story provides a personal glance into the human tragedy of immigration at this difficult time in American history, as well as the repatriation that saw more than a million Mexicans forced to relocate.
Esperanza Rising is fiction, but it’s based on the story of Muñoz Ryan’s own grandmother. As the author...
