' A furiously paced and gripping novel.'- Publishers Weekly 'This gripping story about underprivileged teens is a rewarding read.'- VOYA ' Fast, funny, smart, and heartbreaking.The contemporary survival adventure will keep readers hooked.'- Booklist And most of the time, running away is the quickest path right back to what you’re running from.įrom the streets of Stockton to the beaches of Venice, all the way to the Mexican border, We Were Here follows a journey of self-discovery by a boy who is trying to forgive himself in an unforgiving world. Life usually doesn’ t work out how you think it will, though. He only thought about Mexico and getting to the border to where he could start over. Any home besides his would be a better place to live.īut Miguel didn’t bet on meeting Rondell or Mong or on any of what happened after they broke out. Ever since it happened, his mom can’t even look at him in the face. The judge had no idea that he actually did Miguel a favor. The judge gave him a year in a group home-said he had to write in a journal so some counselor could try to figure out how he thinks.

When it happened, Miguel was sent to Juvi.

The Executive Director of NCTE, Emily Kirkpatrick, describes Matt De la Peña as 'an inspiration and presence among NCTE scholars and educators as they connect students with literacy and language to develop understanding of our world.' In addition to WhiteBoy, De la Peña is the author of fourteen other books, including We Were Here and the 2016 Newbery Medal winner, Last Stop on Market Street.Newbery Award-winning author Matt de la Peña's We Were Here is a 'fast, funny, smart, and heartbreaking' novel. After the speech, he used his fee to buy 240 copies of Mexican WhiteBoy for the students of Tucson High, saying he wanted to “give back what was taken away”.

De la Peña visited the school anyway, sharing his own experiences of art and cultural identity with a student body that is over 60 percent Latinx. The school district had recently ruled to ban all material that risked tangling with “critical race theory” and “promoting racial resentment”. De la Peña made his definitive strike in 2012, when a school in Tucson, Arizona, was forced to remove his novel Mexican WhiteBoy, along with the entire Mexican American studies program, from the curriculum.

Presented by the National Council of Teachers of English, the award recognizes individuals who take a stand against censorship and suppression. Author Matt de la Peña has been honored with the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award.

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