FREE TO LEARN

A tribute to a courageous family of undocumented immigrants who went to court to secure their child’s right to a free public education.

Basing her account on a 1977 case in Texas and adding dialogue but using real names, Levinson tells the tale from 9-year-old Alfredo’s point of view. Traveling north from Zacatecas, Mexico, with his tío, Alfredo slips past the Border Patrol and joins his loving Amá and Apá at last in Tyler. But he’s forced to watch sadly from his window as other children go to school—until the morning his parents pack up the car (in case they have to flee afterward) and sneak into the local federal courthouse to testify before a judge. There the Lopez family hears their lawyer argue that a new state law barring undocumented children from free public schooling is neither fair nor, according to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that everyone is subject to equal treatment under the law, legal. As the author notes in her more detailed afterword, the latter argument not only convinced the judge but also held all the way through multiple appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, giving Alfredo and millions of other undocumented students since then the right to attend school in every state. Most of the figures in Ortega’s warm illustrations (the judge and lawyers excepted) are brown-skinned; Alfredo, bright-eyed and usually smiling, looks equally comfortable in both Mexico and the U.S. and (at last) in school.

Frank and sympathetic in presenting a lesser-known landmark in the struggle for human rights.