Embedded Files
Indivisible by Daniel Aleman
Mateo Garcia and his younger sister, Sophie, have been taught to fear one word for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico started to fade. Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they're hard workers and good neighbors. When Mateo returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken by ICE, he realizes that his family's worst nightmare has become a reality. With his parents' fate and his own future hanging in the balance, Mateo must figure out who he is and what he is capable of, even as he's forced to question what it means to be an American.
Review from School Library Journal:
Mateo is a Mexican American teenager with dreams of stardom. He and his friend Adam want to be drama students at the prestigious Tisch School at NYU. He begins to doubt that dream when another actor at an audition makes a racist comment. Mateo has always had trouble sewing together all of the different parts of his identity. He's never felt fully Mexican or fully American. Mateo is a brother, son, actor, part-time worker at his father's bodega, and gay. He knows he loves watching telenovelas with his mother and hanging out with his best friends Kimmie, who is half Korean, and Adam, who is Italian American. Mateo's carefully constructed path to acting school is disrupted when his mother and father are arrested by ICE agents. The protagonist has to figure out how to keep his father's business afloat, manage new living conditions, and still maintain a positive disposition at school. He feels ill-equipped to deal with the adult responsibilities that have been placed on him. The foundation of his world begins to crumble as Mateo tries to figure out how to support his sister and his parents in a new uncertain landscape. This is a novel about the human face of the immigrant community and is an insightful look at U.S. immigration policy and the families it affects. The uncertainty and heartbreak faced by families separated by deportation is brilliantly displayed. The friendships are genuine and the characters multifaceted.
Page updated
Report abuse