Border Crossing Review

Maria Colleen Cruz’s Border Crossing, a piece of Realistic Fiction, shows us how the lack of cultural identity can cause curiosity to form which leads us in a journey in order to find answers.

My Experience in the book was fascinating because I saw all the differences my cultural identity had from Ceci’s Cultural Identity and seeing how brave Ceci was to cross the border just to find out her identity. I felt like this book was engaging and it pulled me in with the title page.

The Main Characters in this book have lots of qualities. Ceci’s and her Father’s past have shaped their lives through their cultural identity. They speak mostly English and have begun to lose their Mexican culture by not practicing the culture or the customs. Ceci’s Father does not share his customs with his family because he does not want his own children to go through the discrimination that he felt when he was a kid. This led Ceci to be curious about her family’s culture, which led to her to go to Mexico to find Aunt Delfina and learn about her Cultural Identity and past.

Ceci and her Dad change a lot a the end of the book. Ceci notices why her dad hid her from different things and she was not going to be discriminatory to other races because of stereotypes. Her dad noticed how hiding his cultural identity from his family was making them worse than telling them the truth and he decides to be sincere about his past.

What I found interesting about this story is that it kept shifting from present to past and vice versa. For example, Ceci was on a train and when the chapter ended, it shifted to a memory showing more about her past and what had led up to the trip she had taken. This book was taken from the perspective of Ceci throughout the whole story, showing her thoughts, speech and actions.

The author explores different themes. Immigration, Stereotypes and Identity. Immigration is shown in the title with the picture and throughout the book with different references from different characters. Stereotypes are shown in some parts of the book when the main character or other characters have the same thought towards a race. Identity is shown when Ceci has questions about her past and when Aunt Delfina tells her about her dad’s past and how Mexicans were treated.

There are 2 passages that are insightful to me. The first one is when Aunt Delfina is telling Ceci about her and Ceci’s Dad’s experience when they were younger in their school. This showed us how they were discriminated and how they were treated by their teacher and classmates. The other passage is when Ceci’s dad takes her to the town he lived in when he was a kid and confessed everything he had hid to Cesi, which gave us a better understanding of why he had done that.

The ending was very satisfying because Ceci’s dad answers all the question we might have had earlier in the book. He answers them because he explains to Ceci why he had hidden their cultural identity from them.

If I could ask a question to the author, I would ask, “Was your original plan to make Ceci meet a complete stranger which leads her to the answer or were you planing for her to find out the information on her own?” I would ask this because it feels weird how Ceci meets a stranger, which leads her to the answers, and finds out that he was her cousin. I find it a bit coincidental. This book inspires me to read others about people doing brave things just to find out more about themselves.

This novel has shown me of how people are being discriminated, maltreated, or abused just because of different beliefs, skin color, opportunities, money or gender. This is a very big problem in the world right know and humans have to learn that every person has to be treated equally. This is a problem with the US right now. Donald Trump has banned several thousand immigrants, taken away rights for citizenship and stopped receiving people from certain places.