A review by cdjdhj
The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child by Francisco Jiménez

3.0

I read this for my class on Boys and Literacy. I plan to pair this non-fiction book with the fiction book, Crossing the Wire, by Will Hobbs, that I recently read. This book, Circuit, is a small book of short stories from the life of a migrant child in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The stories are interesting and very eye opening. This migrant child eventually grew up to be a professor of modern languages at Santa Clara University, but his early years as the child of illegal migrant farm workers was filled with poverty, deprivation and discrimination. My next read will be the sequel to this, a book called Breaking Through. Everyone who thinks he or she is an expert on the problem of illegal immigration and what should be done about it needs to read and contemplate this book and and others like Crossing the Wire and the Tortilla Curtain. It reminds me of the famous quote by Atticus Finch in the classic To Kill a Mockingbird (a book I dearly love) when he said that you never really know someone until you walk around in his shoes. Books like this one allow us to walk in the shoes of those individuals who come to this country out of poverty and desparation and do our most menial work for sub-standard pay, all while living in fear of being sent back to conditions so bad we can barely imagine them. Very thought provoking.