25 February 2020: “It’s like my mom and dad created a whole new world for themselves. I live in their new world. But they understand the old world, the world they came from—and I don’t. I don’t belong anywhere. That’s the problem.” --Benjamin Alire Saenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Re-reading this book again for my YA lit class and falling for it all over again. T
his time, perhaps because I am also teaching American Ethnic Literature in the same semester, I am paying more attention to the role of ethnicity, specifically the title characters' Mexican-American heritage, on display in the passage above. In the Ethnic Lit class, I've been thinking and talking quite a bit about first-generation Americans' experiences with their parents, something that is also reflected here.
In the YA class, I keep talking to my students about the "windows and mirrors" concept, specifically multicultural YA--that some students need texts that allow them to see into worlds they don't know (windows) and others need texts that reflect themselves back (mirrors). But texts like this one? In this moment, they do both. Dante is like so many kids--feeling unable to fit into his parents' world and like he doesn't belong anywhere. Yes, his experience is shaped by his ethnicity, but some of what he is talking about transcends that.
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