Esperanza Rising

Esperanza Rising is a 2000 historical novel for younger readers by the American author Pam Muñoz Ryan, published by Scholastic Press. Esperanza is the only daughter of a wealthy Mexican family, and her early life is made of servants, parties and expectations rather than work.

That life ends when she and her mother have to leave the country and travel north into California, where they join a community of Mexican farm workers living in labour camps. She has never had to look after herself, and much of the book is the work of learning to do it beside people who have been doing it all their lives. The camp is a place with its own routines, its own opinions about newcomers and its own economics, and Esperanza's position in it changes slowly.

The historical moment Ryan writes in is the eve of the Great Depression, when California agriculture depended on Mexican labour and the families doing that work had the least protection when the economy turned. The book keeps that history at the level of one household, so the period arrives as wages, housing and schooling rather than as events, and the movement it traces is a girl who is waited on becoming a girl who can carry the people around her.