Through Fences

Winner, 2025 TACHE Outstanding Book Award in Fiction
Honor-winner, 2025 Texas Institute of Letters Jean Flynn Award for Best Young Adult Book
Longlisted, REFORMA National Book Award 2024

Through Fences follows the ups and downs of Latino kids and young adults in the US–Mexico borderlands: San Ysidro, Calexico, McAllen, and back and forth across the border. A young girl’s journey north goes wrong, and now she is in a forbidding new place, away from her parents and brother, where she doesn’t understand what the adults in green are saying even as she tries to obey their rules. Rocky, one of the few white kids in town, stands by and watches as Miguel is jumped by two of his friends. Maggie and her parents are separated at the border in a tragic accident. Alberto’s son doesn’t understand his Mexican father’s hatred for illegals or his work as a border patrol agent. Alicia is a TikTok influencer who doesn’t want to grow up to be a hospital cleaning lady like her mother, but COVID complicates things. Whatever their challenges, the kids, teens, tweens, and adults in these pages are just trying to survive their everyday lives. Vibrantly illustrated by Oscar Garza, each of these short stories brings a different perspective on the perils of living on the border while brown.