A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez
Roberto is the youngest of four children, the only one born in the United States. To his Mexican immigrant family in 1930, he is the future. While he’s the best student in Mrs. Markland’s fifth-grade class, he’s also a regular kid who wants to play with his friends and be the one to break the Christmas piñata. Still, changes are coming to his community set among the lemon groves near San Diego. Two girls he likes are moving away because their father is out of work. His best friend, David, and David’s family disappear one day, deported to Mexico. A barn in his neighborhood is being turned into a school where the Mexican American children will be sent, expelled from the elementary school they’ve attended for years. Not even Roberto, for all his top grades, will be allowed to stay. Community leaders decide to take the children out of school and sue the district for discrimination. Because of his academic achievements, Roberto is chosen as the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit to testify in court.
This is a huge responsibility for a 12-year-old, and through free verse in a fictionalized biography, Águila conveys how the weight of the entire community rests heavily on Roberto’s shoulders. Readers feel his sense of betrayal when his teacher sides with the school district and lies under oath that multiple grades of Mexican American children can receive the same education in a converted one-room barn that the white children receive in a dedicated school building. The corrido of the subtitle (“The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez”) refers to a traditional Mexican musical genre that honors community heroes, and this book for middle-grade readers shows that real heroes are not those who aren’t afraid, but those who are afraid and do the right thing anyway.
