111 pages • 3 hours read
Matt de la PeñaMexican WhiteBoy
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Danny Lands in National City”
Sixteen-year-old Danny Lopez arrives in National City, a suburb of San Diego, California, located just north of the Mexican border. Danny has come to spend summer with his cousin’s family while his mom and sister are in San Francisco. Danny is half-Mexican; his father is Mexican, and his mother is white. His cousin, Sofia, who is only one year older but much more mature, is happy to see Danny and proudly introduces him to her “girls” who are clustered at the edge of the cul-de-sac. Immediately, they ogle Danny and behave in outwardly suggestive ways toward him. At six feet, tall and lanky, Danny is self-conscious and “cringes at how different he must seem” (3). He hardly speaks and seems awkward around the girls, despite their obvious approval of him. His discomfort is, in part, due to his privilege. He lives in Leucadia, a coastal community in northern San Diego County, where he attends a prestigious prep school and plays baseball. In the presence of his Mexican family, Danny sees himself as inferior. Although he wants to be in National City, he feels out of place there. He is troubled by how different he is, by the fact he “is too clean, too light, [and] his clothes too soft” (3).
Sofia and her friends talk about their plans for summer while Danny watches a bunch of local boys play a game of stickball in the cul-de-sac. The girls carry on broadcasting each other’s personal stories, laughing at one who’d cried while getting her new tattoo, and at another who is called out for having “mad STDs” (3). Danny laughs to fit in, but it’s clear he is out of his element. He keeps his eyes on the game; his desire to play is intense and visceral, and as he watches, he digs his nails into his skin so hard that he draws blood. He notes that everyone in the game is Mexican except for one boy, who is black. The neighborhood is also predominately Mexican, except for one light-skinned girl who catches his attention. She is not with Sofia’s friends but across the way, caring for a toddler. Danny watches her and wonders if her mother is white, too. It is revealed that the reason Danny has come to National City is so he can work and save enough money to fly to Ensenada, where he believes he will be reunited with his father, who left three years before.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Home Run Derby: Uno’s Time Has Come”
The goal of stickball is to hit the tennis ball over the Rodriguez’s house. The Rodriguezes are a retired couple whose son, now grown and working as a resident at a children’s hospital in New Mexico, started the home run derby as a kid. The Rodriguezes let the boys hold the derby in their yard in exchange for the boys painting their house at the end of each summer.
Danny watches and listens as the stickball players lob good-natured barbs at each other, personal attacks only members of the same group could get away with. Even in this competitive situation, it is clear these boys are united, either through friendship or the shared experience of living in this neighborhood.
On home run derby Saturday, each player puts money in a hat and the person who hits the most home runs—that is, launches the most balls over the Rodriguez’s house—wins the money. Uno sees this as his summer, the “summer he’s gonna clean fools out” (9). A recent growth spurt has transformed him from a boy to a man, at least physically. As “the only black kid in the neighborhood—or negrito, as the old Mexicans call him (even though his mom is Mexican, too)—he’s also stronger, quicker, taller, a better fighter” (9). Uno’s younger stepbrother, Manny, sits on the sidelines and cheers for everyone. He had previously been institutionalized for being “slow in the head” (10) but now lives with Uno and their parents. Uno is a caring big brother and delights in entertaining Manny, who “goes crazy for his chicken dance” (11). On Saturdays, Manny sits on the sidelines and taunts batters with “Hey, batter, batter! Swing” (9), but no one minds. The chapter closes with Uno at bat, distracted by the presence of Sofia with “some light-skinned Mexican skater-looking kid standing by her side” (11). He thinks Sofia “gots a man now” (11) and he’s jealous.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Shot Heard Round the Cul-de-Sac”
Sofia marches into the middle of the game and in a taunting but semi-flirtatious manner says, “Yo, who’s winnin’ this bullshit?” (12). Uno confirms that he is. Sofia tells him she couldn’t tell, and that Danny is better than all of them at baseball. She puts two dollars in the baseball cap and enters Danny into the derby.
Danny steps up to the plate, or the trash can lid improvising as home plate, and studies Uno’s first several pitches. Uno and the others find Danny’s inaction frustrating and yell to him to just hit the ball. Danny’s patience pays off when he “crushes” the tennis ball, sending it over the house behind the Rodriguez’s. It makes Danny “feel alive to crush something with a bat” (19). Sofia cheers ecstatically for her cousin, who has hit it twice as far as any other boy. This further irritates Uno, who is protective of his record and feels threatened by Danny’s abilities. After Danny hits three consecutive home runs, Uno starts throwing fastballs, not to Danny but at him, and then he calls Danny a “bitch” for stepping away from the ball. Everyone can see what Uno is doing, though he denies it. Danny also knows what’s happening, so he prepares for another wild pitch. When Uno delivers a high inside fastball, Danny makes an awkward connection. It sends the bat flying out of his hands, inadvertently hitting Uno’s little brother in the face. Infuriated, Uno rushes Danny and accuses him of hitting Manny on purpose. Uno knows Manny’s injury is his own fault, but he takes the opportunity to put Danny in his place. Danny’s apologies are met with aggression. Uno shoves him hard, throwing him to the ground. Uno defends his actions to Sofia on the grounds that Danny injured his brother.
Danny is on the ground, bleeding profusely, and it’s evident he has sustained a head injury. As he enters in and out of consciousness, Danny composes a letter to his dad. In it, the reader learns Danny’s father has done something “crazy” and that is why he left. Danny’s letter also reveals that he thinks the “crazy thing” his father has done is to have had him, a half-white boy. Danny’s letter presumes his father is living in Mexico because he must have been so “sick of living in a city with so many white people, with a white wife, with two kids who were half white” (27). He empathizes with his dad wanting “to be around more Mexicans […] [his] real family” (28). He tells his father how much he has changed and “how much stronger and darker and more Mexican” (28) he is and how just that very day, he “knocked some kid out (28)”. As Danny continues fading in and out, the pretty, light-skinned girl hovers over him, speaking in Spanish.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Danny has chosen to stay in National City over accompanying his mom and sister to San Francisco because he wants to spend time with his father’s family, the father who he has not seen in three years. He hopes to reunite with his dad and through being around his Mexican family, his grandmother and uncles, he thinks he will become more Mexican. That is the way he perceives his father as having wanted him to be. Danny even plans to visit his father in Ensenada, where he thinks he is living. It’s clear Danny knows little about the actual circumstances of his father and has filled in all the details with his own narrative, one about not being good enough or Mexican enough for his father to accept him. This story Danny has created for himself about his father’s disappearance has him consumed with trying to be something he thinks his father wanted him to be and would have kept his father from leaving.
Danny is not only struggling to find his identity as a young man through his relationship to his father but also as a person of mixed decent. His father is Mexican and so Danny, desperately wanting a relationship with his father, eschews the white part of himself and immerses himself in his father’s neighborhood and culture; only, he can’t do so completely. He doesn’t look Mexican because his skin is lighter, and he cannot communicate with many of the boys because he does not speak Spanish. He is an outsider. He resents his light skin, particularly in the presence of his darker-skinned family members, as much as he resents not understanding what they say. He has not grown up in National City, at least not for the last several years, and that is evident to everyone. In terms of his family, though, he is the only one who views this as a negative.
Danny lives with his mom and sister in Leucadia, a beach town about forty minutes north by car but a different world entirely. Compared to the National City neighborhood where his dad is from, Leucadia is affluent and white. Leucadia is Danny’s status quo. Danny is well-educated and intelligent enough to have earned a full scholarship to Leucadia Prep. As a rule, Danny tries not to speak. He’s sworn off his mother’s English and he can’t speak Spanish, so he just doesn’t speak. His presence, though, is enough to draw sharp contrast to the way Sofia and her friends speak. Their language is laden with slang, excessive profanity, double negatives, and general improper usage. Whether or not proper English is known by Sofia and friends, it is cast aside in favor of a “street” English that indicates belonging, and thus highlights another way in which Danny does not belong.
Danny naturally dresses like he is from Leucadia. At school he wears a uniform that includes a collared shirt and a tie. Casually, which is how he arrives in National City, he wears surf brands like Billabong and Vans. His cousin’s male friends wear Dickies, Timberlands and flat hats. These differences are both glaring and embarrassing to Danny and make him every bit as uncomfortable as his light skin and his inability to speak Spanish.
Danny does have something he’s proud of, though, something that he loves and that transcends outward identity: baseball. He is an extremely talented player. When Sofia enters him into the stickball game, he far outshines all the others, including Uno. Uno is black, or at least that is how he is described. The reality is, he, too, is half-Mexican. Not unlike Danny, it is the part of him that is not Mexican that stands out. Uno has assimilated in other ways, though: through his dress, his language, and, unfortunately for Danny, his use of violence to define his power. Danny’s baseball prowess threatens Uno’s top standing and because of Uno’s need to defend his position as best player, he uses the excuse of his brother’s injury by Danny’s flying bat to release the aggression he’d wanted to all along. Despite Danny’s apologies for losing control of the bat, Uno beats Danny with his fists and inflicts injuries so serious Danny is taken to the hospital for stitches.
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