Esperanza Rising

‘So you’re a princess who’s come to be a peasant? Where’s all your finery?’ The ‘princess’ is 13-year-old Esperanza Ortega, here being taunted by Marta, a young would-be revolutionary not happy to settle for the status quo in the Mexico of 1930. Esperanza’s has indeed been a riches to rags story. When we first meet her, she is the privileged only child of privileged landowners, whose fortunes are soon to be transformed when her father is killed and unscrupulous uncles seize his property. For Esperanza, her mother and three loyal servants what follows is a long, dangerous journey to the fruit and vegetable farms of California, where, as workers, they witness and experience hardship and degradation. But, as its heroine’s name implies, this is a story ultimately dominated by notions of hope; while having occasional moments of near sentimentality and overt didacticism, it is firmly on the side of life, growth and necessary personal and social change.