It is certainly true that the children of the working poor, in the U.S. as in many other countries, have traditionally been (and continue to be) deprived — nutritionally, medically, educationally, and in other ways as well — and that children belonging to racial and cultural minorities are not only statistically much more likely to be poor but are also frequently subjected to the insults of the bigoted majority. School- and university-aged readers, especially, need to be made aware of these truths if they are not already aware of them. But while such a reading of these stories is perhaps unavoidable, it would seem that to limit ourselves to such a reading would be to deprive ourselves not only of the stories' pleasures but of much of their "meaning" as well. These children do not feel themselves oppressed or deprived; they are experiencing the richness and sensuousness of childhood in environments where they are cared for and cared about. It is perhaps good to remember that they are not sitting sadly in front of television sets or playing endless video games, numbing themselves as their senses and imaginations slowly evaporate.
Thematically, the stories in this section introduce and develop the idea of displacement or alienation. This theme is only the faintest of whispers in "My Lucy Friend . . . ," where the speaker may be either living with her grandparents or staying with them temporarily (and where she calls Lucy a "Texas girl" as if she herself were not one), and is not present at all in "Mexican Movies," where the speaker seems absolutely happy and comfortable with her family. "Eleven," about the awful and sometimes irrational (from an adult point of view) misery of very early adolescence, finds its narrator, Rachel, wishing she were elsewhere — or nowhere — after her encounter with the dreaded sweater, which offends her in a way that must be almost purely subjective, for Phyllis Lopez has no qualms about claiming it later. Salvador, in "Salvador Late or Early" is forced — by circumstances, but also by his own good heart — to be older than his age, and we can see in this small, apologetic boy something of the humble, worried, perhaps sad man he will someday become.
