This book sparked an interesting discussion at home, regarding belonging / being excluded by "cliques" in school and elsewhere.
Twelve-year-old Malú's mom is SuperMexican mom and her dad is a punk-loving white guy. This puts Malú in a funny spot. She loves punk rock, just like her dad, and inside his record (vinyl) store, with visiting bands who come to play, she feels right at home. But she's got her mom's complexion and, that she knows of, punk is not considered traditionally Mexican music.
Her mom is always (and this gets really old, really quick) trying to make her be more like a señorita, a young lady, but specifically her mom's perceived version of what a young lady should be (more Mexican). It's annoying to Malú, and to the reader, because it showcases just how rigid her mother is about imposing a cultural expectation on a 12-year-old whose daily reality is very different than her mother's. It's also coming from, for all that her mother is a well-educated college professor, an uneducated (regarding punk music) place. It highlights the maxim, an expert in one thing is often ignorant of everything they don't know about everything else. Her mother doesn't know punk music and doesn't try to learn about it.
Now, Malú's mom takes a job across country in Chicago, where there's a much larger Mexican American population, and her mom, predictably, hopes this will help Malú learn about and internalize her Mexican American heritage.
It does, but not in the way her mom hopes. Initially, Malú flat-out rebels -- she dresses punk, puts on way too much makeup and gets "dress coded" on the very first day of school. The Mexican American students, mostly the girls, at the school who can trace their families going back generations deride her for being a "coconut," dark on the outside, white on the inside, and not a "real" Mexican American.
But the longer she's in the neighborhood, the more she makes friends and soon she discovers a local shop owner who's Mexican American -- and loves punk! And from her, Malú discovers there's a rich tradition of Mexican and Mexican American punk musicians.
Malú forms a punk band with some friends, the middle school principal doesn't think it's Mexican enough for the annual talent show and they're not allowed to perform. So they come up with their own solution -- covering a Mexican song in punk rock style -- and make their own performance venue.
There's also a side plot about a girl who dances traditional Mexican dance, but who wants to try Irish dancing. She is discouraged by her mother, because it's not what her mother expects her to do.
I won't ruin how it ends. It's a wonderfully layered read.
In our household, it sparked conversations of what it means to be called a "coconut." My husband, whose parents are both Mexican American, basically said he got called this and "oreo" in high school and was derided for not being Mexican "enough," because he didn't speak Spanish fluently and wear cowboy hats or boots.
Whereas our two kiddos, who are like Malú, product of one white parent, one Mexican American parent, have never been called these words, although my daughter was called fresa, something I explore in my own MS.
We hope this reflects a change in the world, one signaling it's a bit more accepting of all of us and all our differences and that celebrates what we have to learn from each other, instead of using those differences as criteria for exclusion.
Teacher's Note: The publisher, Penguin Random House, offers a free Discussion Guide with 11 questions, a pre-reading activity, three activities while reading and one post-reading activity correlated to 8th grade Common Core English Language Arts Standards, RL 8.2-5, RI 8.7 and several ELA Listening & Speaking standards.
