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This Spring 2025, I plan to read a novel with my classes I recently plucked off my shelf here in Mexicali. It's called Paradise Travel, and it is written by Jorge Franco. I'm not giving any spoiler alerts, but it focuses upon the American Dream - two teen-age lovers, Marlon and Reina from Medellín, Colombia, who successfully make the long, ardous journey to New York City but learn tough, life-changing lessons along the way. I like this novel, for the CHANGE in characters that happens right before our eyes. Both Marlon and Reina become Hard and Knowing. They are entirely different people at the end of the novel. Did their journey to the U.S. change the way they saw each other? How did their struggle to fit in, to find their place, to define their identities...Affect Their Love?
In my English 105 classes we read a sixties novel, Motorcycle on the Sea of Tranquility. Take a look at the cover, and amidst the mosaic of bright and happy colors you‘ll catch the blast of a street bike and a young girl’s naked thigh. What you don´t get is a frightening story that takes place along the mean streets of an East San Diego Barrio. Yoli is 14 and is feeling it - emotion, culture and sex – on the verge of her coming out party. For Chuy, her favourite brother and returning Vietnam veteran, the party is over. Patricia Santana paints a picture of a young girl´s innoncence that she will never get back. You see, her brother has changed since returning from overseas. His voice is distant. The gleam in his eye is violent. The picture is dark and brooding. Chuy’s soul has gone up in smoke like the exhaust out of a tailpipe.