The Crossing

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Over the next week, please begin and complete the reading of The Crossing by Gary Paulsen. This blog entry will help you on your way, but I assume you will have little to no trouble with this book, as you are at a higher reading level than its intended audience. Still, if we are concerned with learning to write for all markets, children are people too--and deserve our respect. At its heart, this book brings up some very important contemporary issues for both U.S. American citizens and a sympathetic understanding of Mexican border culture.

Please take a look at this website and learn a little about the author before or as you read The Crossing.
Gary Paulsen Biographical (author) Info

The Crossing deals with a young, male protagonist named Manny. The setting takes place in Juarez, Mexico. Please take a moment to watch this video documentary to learn a little about Juarez. Juarez: City at War.
This video will help explain the situation of the drug cartels and the issue in Juarez: Behind Mexico's Bloodshed.

Much of Paulsen's fiction for young adults involves a young protagonist who forms an unlikely bond with an adult. In this book, Manny meets Sergeant Locke, a Vietnam Veteran, who lives in El Paso, Texas. Here's a little video to picture El Paso.

Themes in the book include all that is good for young, struggling students that schools are trying to encourage to read (i.e., hispanic/latino males). Keep this target audience in the back of your mind as you read. Themes include: physical survival in urban/rural "war" zones, respect for the natural world (nature), humanity (humane acts of kindness for example) versus inhumanity (cruelty), and, of course, death--any story that includes death usually includes death as a theme. Paulsen is a fan of Hemingway (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises) and uses the same sort of spare style of writing Hemingway used. Hemingway's prose style helped shape the simplistic syntax style of contemporary fiction.

The Crossing is a political book to an extent. Take a moment to view President Obama's speech, delivered last year:

The President's Speech on Immigration to the people of El Paso, Texas.
and check out these things:
Border Patrol Program
Newt Gingrich on Immigration
Alabama Immigration Law
NAFTA & Mexican Agriculture

And for fun:
The Great Immigration Debate (from Super News)

HOMEWORK: Please read The Crossing.

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