In Carolina Ixta's New Novel, Teens Fight Against Pollution for a 'Few Blue Skies'

""My father was a delivery man for a bread company in San Francisco, so as a kid, I was very aware of how work was a way to make money, but [also] how work really affected my family and their health," she says, noting that he sustained a number of injuries on the job. Ixta was also inspired by her grandfather's time in the Bracero Program,""

""But they are having those quintessential American and Latinx experiences under Selva's dark shadow, which literally blots out their once-blue skies. Ixta's novel wraps these issues in a juicy love story and a sympathetic familial drama. Her prose is expressive throughout. A school fistfight turns one teen's mouth into \"a grid of red clenched between his teeth\" and Paloma's life""

Paloma and other Latinx teens confront an industrial project called Selva that literally blots out blue skies and harms community health. The narrative draws on labor histories, including a deliveryman father's workplace injuries and a grandfather's experience in the Bracero Program, to illuminate multigenerational economic precarity. Youth activism and grassroots opposition to warehouse construction emerge through epigraphic testimony equating children in the Inland Empire to canaries in coal mines. The plot combines a romantic storyline and family drama with expressive prose and vivid scenes, such as a school fistfight rendered as 'a grid of red clenched between his teeth.'

Read at Kqed