In 2016, Francisco X. Stork’s response to rising calls to “build a wall” was to write a book.
Disappeared was the story of Sara and Emiliano Zapata, a young Mexican journalist and her teenage brother forced to flee their native city, Ciudad Juárez, after exposing a human trafficking ring. With henchmen in hot pursuit, the siblings make the harrowing journey across the border and into the United States.
“I started writing Disappeared at the time of the last presidential election, when there were so many caricatures of immigrants out there,” says Stork, 67, who was born in Mexico and moved to El Paso, Texas, with his mother and adoptive father when he was 9.
The ubiquity of anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant, and anti-refugee sentiments revealed during the election both surprised and angered him. “What was so powerful to me was to see so many people who felt that way,” he tells Kirkus by phone from his home in Massachusetts. “There’s a certain anger that I had.…I had to work with it, to transform that anger into something creative. To create complex characters, complex situations, which approximate the real.”
Realistic fiction depicting Latinx teens’ unique lives are Stork’s stock in trade. The celebrated YA author’s eight novels include Chicano/Latino Literary Prize winner The Way of the Jaguar (2000), Marcelo in the Real World (2009), and The Memory of Light (2016). A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School, he practiced at a number of private law firms and public agencies while pursuing his calling to write.
“I usually leave books in a kind of hopeful place,” says Stork, who intended Disappeared to be a stand-alone novel. But several months after filing the manuscript, Sara and Emiliano remained at the forefront of his mind. “This was one of the few times that I felt that there was more to their story, more that they needed to resolve in their own lives.”
In Illegal (Scholastic, Aug. 4), Book 2 of the Disappeared series, Sara and Emiliano are forced to contend with the realities of seeking refuge in the United States. For complicated reasons, Sara chooses to surrender to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. She’s incarcerated at the Fort Stockton Detention Center, awaiting approval of her asylum application.
Emiliano remains in Texas, harbored by a kind stranger, carrying a cellphone whose contents could bring down cartel members and power players on both sides of the border. He must decide whether to continue north, to reunite with their estranged father in Illinois, while figuring out how to access and deploy the incriminating information.
Throughout the book, Sara and Emiliano grapple with what it means to be a moral agent in the face of many fraught and dangerous situations. To do so, they discover, is never as simple as following the law of the land.
“There’s this whole concept of the United States being a nation of laws,” Stork says. “But then, how are those laws created? Just because it’s a law doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s just. Even if the law is just, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s justly implemented.”
Illegal alternates between Sara’s and Emiliano’s points of view, marking a departure from the earlier book’s third-person narration. The effect, Kirkus writes, is “a biting indictment of the U.S. government’s immoral apathy to the refugee crisis within its borders. Strong character development, however, reigns supreme.”
“I was able to access Sara’s mind better in the first person,” Stork says of the sequel. “I wanted to capture what I guess you would call a ‘loss of faith’ that she goes through in the book, of the belief that the United States still has the best system of laws, and it was difficult to capture that intimacy in the third person. The same thing with Emiliano, with the more kind of intimate things—can he forgive his father, observations about his travels in this country—it just seemed like the first person was doable.”
Stork deftly presents Illegal’s weighty subject matter with humor and heart. And in moments of grace and gratitude, his characters discover that where we come from is not always the same as where we belong.
“To me, coming from Mexico, living in the United States, there’s always a sense of a paradox,” Stork says. “I’m appreciative of the opportunities that this country gave me but also [have] a hollow feeling in my heart. There’s always been a search for belonging.
“I never quite fit in, which is probably not a bad thing,” he says. “It happened to me in the profession of law, when I was working as a lawyer, and I didn’t quite feel like that was the right fit for me. That feeling of not belonging kept me searching and, eventually, led me to try to be a writer. To find a place of belonging, at least, in what I was doing with my life.”
Megan Labrise is the editor at large and host of the Fully Booked podcast.
