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Jimenez, Francisco.
BREAKING THROUGH
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001
IL 5-8, RL 7.4
ISBN 0618011730
It is a cold crisp, dawn for Francisco Jimenez, but instead of getting ready for school, this teen is in the fields doing backbreaking work of picking strawberries. Although he is only 14, Francisco has little choice but to work.  His family is poor, and they depend on every cent from every strawberry he picks for just basic survival, food and housing. What about his rights and child labor laws?  Jimenez and his family are invisible to most Americans. They are under the radar of the human rights laws, often having to survive in desperate situations. To make matters worse, the families are often here illegally.  If caught they face deportation to even more desperate lives in Mexico.
Francisco Jimenez’s autobiography, Breaking Through, tells of the conditions and the hardships faced by immigrant families in America in the 1950s in California. This story, however, also portrays a family's courage to overcome hard obstacles and find a place in America.

 
Prepared by: Mary Hill  for South Carolina Young Adult Book Award Nominees 2005
SUBJECTS:     Mexican Americans -- Fiction.
                        Agricultural laborers -- Fiction.
                        California -- Fiction.

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