May 2025 - Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From by Jennifer De Leon
- chaise1158
- Jun 16
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 17
Book blog #9: May 2025 Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From
Even though some of our regular members were missing, our book club was at its largest for the discussion of Jennifer De Leon’s book Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From. Thirteen of us gathered to discuss this YA novel, and the discussion centered on the METCO program in particular.
In case you are unaware of METCO, here is some information copied from the Massachusetts Department of Education’s Website:
The METCO (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity) Program is a grant program funded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It is a voluntary program intended to expand educational opportunities, increase diversity, and reduce racial isolation for students in urban and suburban communities, by fostering the opportunity for children from Boston and Springfield to attend public schools in neighboring communities in order for students to develop a deeper understanding of one another in an integrated public school setting.
METCO has been in existence since 1966 and was originally funded through a grant by the Carnegie Foundation and United States Office of Education. In that year the first METCO legislation was filed, METCO Inc. was established, and seven school districts began accepting the first two hundred METCO students. Currently, there are about 3,200 students participating in 38 school districts in metropolitan Boston and at four school districts outside Springfield.
Source: https://www.doe.mass.edu/metco/
Some of the club attendees host or work with M.E.T.C.O. students, and they attended the book club meeting because of their special interest in the program.
Both in this meeting and at another meeting about METCO students, someone brought up the important point that it is not only the METCO students who benefit from the program, but it is also the members of the less diverse (mostly white) suburban schools who benefit from what the METCO students have to offer. The adult hosts of METCO students, who open their homes so students have a place to relax and feel comfortable between activities/bus rides home, comment that the relationships with these students have enriched them immeasurably.
As for the METCO students themselves, it should be recognized that they often weather numerous social, cultural, and logistical challenges: by this last I’m referring to the long bus rides to and from school, and the longer days, with early rising times. Nevertheless, despite the challenges, reports on METCO have found that the program benefits students overall. To learn more about this, (including information suggestive of where the program falls short), please read the following interesting and informative article from WBUR. It also includes a statement from a past graduate of the METCO program:
In Jennifer De Leon’s YA novel Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, protagonist Liliana wins the METCO lottery and leaves her Boston school for a mostly-white school in a wealthy suburb where she finds herself dealing with a completely new social scene. She doesn’t have all the support she needs from the school administration and her new classmates regard her with prejudice or indifference. On top of that, she has to deal with problems at home, most notably the disappearance of her father, who we eventually learn has been deported because he is undocumented.
A week after we had the book club meeting, a good number of us in the book club attended a special event with the author. The event was held at the Swampscott Elementary School, and while it was not very well attended (most of us in the audience were well beyond school age), it was clearly appreciated by those who were there.
De Leon started off with the words of Toni Morrison, who inspired her: “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” She shared some slides that showed statistics about minority representation in literature, and these statistics showed that the number of books with animals as the protagonists (27%) was greater than the number of books with minority representation. Although I do not have the particular slides that De Leon shared, here I am including a link with some statistics that I found:
De Leon’s words about the importance of representation of minorities in literature reminded me of being strongly impacted by this topic when it first came to my attention a year or two ago. I remembered having read about a woman who studied and articulated this very problem decades back. Looking around for the information now, I think I located it in an article by Nancy Larrick, entitled “The All-White World of Children’s Books”. It was written for the Saturday Review in 1965–sixty years ago! At the top of the article there is a picture of what appears to be a white librarian looking into the upturned face of a young Black girl. An open book is before them. The caption to the picture reads “Across the country 6,340,000 non-white children are learning to read and to understand the American way of life in books which omit them entirely or scarcely mention them” (Larrick 63) In the article, Larrick writes that harm is done to the children who do not find themselves represented in books, but she also makes an insightful comment about the harm done to white children: “But the impact of all-white books upon 39,600,000 white children is probably even worse. Although his light skin makes him one of the world’s minorities, the white child learns from his books that he is kingfish. There seems little chance of developing the humility so urgently needed for world cooperation, instead of world conflict, as long as our children are brought up on gentle doses of racism throughout their books.” (Larrick 63)
Towards the end of the article, Larrick writes about what was at that time the newly formed Council for Interracial Books for Children. (The board featured such prominent members as Dr. Benjamin Spock and author Langston Hughes.) The council would organize prizes for outstanding books and negotiate with editors to get the works published.
Although Larrick and no doubt others articulated the problem of the deficit of books by minorities (she wrote specifically about the deficit of books that depicted black characters in everyday, real-life situations), nowadays we are actually seeing a rise in the banning of such books. According to the NAACP, the peak number of banned books was in 2023. The NAACP makes a declaration similar to what Larrick said back in 1965:
Prior to the rise in book bans, white male youth were already more likely to see themselves depicted in children's books than their peers, despite research demonstrating how more culturally inclusive material can uplift all children, according to a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
See the Website for more information:
So with all of this, it is clear that we greatly need books like Jennifer De Leon’s YA novel about the experience of a Hispanic teenager.
To return to her presentation at the author event, for those of us who had just read Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, it was clear how De Leon got the ideas for her character Liliana: When she (De Leon) spoke about growing up as the child of immigrants from Guatemala, she talked about her experiences as “white Jen” versus “Latina Jen”. On the one hand, people out and about would ask her why she spoke Spanish, while at home her own cousins would ask her why she “sounded like a white girl”. She talked about how when she was at college, questions people asked her made her feel “othered”. One of our book club members asked De Leon’s opinion about if it is ever okay to ask “Where are you from?”, especially when the question is meant kindly, simply out of curiosity. De Leon suggested a better wording of the question may be “Where is home for you?”
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