By Deborah Mills, Alfredo Alva
A true story: a boy and his father leave their village in Mexico and make the hard, dangerous walk across the border into Texas, while the rest of the family stays behind.
Alfredo is a young boy in a village in Mexico. There's no work and not enough food, so his father decides the two of them will go north. Just the two of them. His mother and his brothers stay behind, and one of the first things in the book is the goodbye party. They pay a coyote to guide them, but at the Rio Grande the coyote takes their money and walks off and leaves them there, so a grown man and a small child have to do the rest themselves: float across the river, climb a mountain, walk across a valley, sleep on rock, worry about snakes. What they finally reach is not the help they were promised. It's a run-down camp with other people already waiting in it. Then Alfredo is in a school in Texas, alone, with no English, and the last stretch of the book is him learning it slowly, from children who help him with words while he helps them with math. Alfredo Alva is a real person and this is his own childhood, told with Deborah Mills. Every page carries the Spanish and the English side by side.
Most border books hand a child a lesson. This one hands them what actually happened, in order, because Alfredo Alva is telling you his own story, and it's the plainness that makes it work. It also does something almost nothing else here does: the Spanish isn't a few flavor words dropped in, it's the whole text, running alongside the English on every page. A Spanish-speaking child can read the book for real, in the language they're fluent in, in the same room at the same moment as everyone else, then look across and see what the English says. That kind of access is rare, and it's why this one is worth having even in a class where no one has crossed anything. The last stretch, Alfredo alone in a Texas classroom trading math help for English words, is the part your English learners will recognize fastest.