Brian Quijada's third-grade teacher might have been merely concerned with adhering to the lesson plan for illustrating the significance of Rosa Parks in the history of American racial desegregation, but when a pupil of Salvadorean immigrant parentage inquired, "Where did we sit on the bus?" her reply—"You weren't there"—raised cosmological questions sufficient to inspire a ninety-minute account of the young inquirer's search for an answer. This autobiographical narrative begins with our protagonist's conception, gestation and parturition—no one can accuse Quijada of not being thorough—in order to highlight the epistemological difficulty of tracking one's lineage over, not only centuries, but continents, before forging an identity therefrom. Complicating the journey even more is the Quijada family's resettlement in the North suburbs of Chicago, where Brian's cultural education expands to include the customs of Jewish and Italian classmates, drawing the resentment of his Latino comrades. Also engendering conflict are his artistic proclivities, dismissed by his elders as an inadequate foundation for adult responsibilities, and his recent proposal of marriage to a woman of decidedly Eurocentric ancestry. (He envisions the dance music at their wedding reception featuring a DJ mixing Polka and Cumbia.)
Speaking of music, did I mention that Quijada recounts his saga in a polyglot of bilingual prose, slam-style poetry and Hip-Hop versifying, accompanied by a swarm of disco floor-lights and a self-propelled orchestra consisting of electric ukulele, acoustic harmonica, live-loop device and smartphone? And that his teenage worship of Michael Jackson mandates a display or two of flash-fancy footwork?
Hindsight tells us that when Ms. Parks was defying the seating arrangements of Alabama's public transit in 1955, Quijada's peers were likely being nudged to the backs of buses in California—but our storyteller is not content to leave us anticipating his prospective offspring suffering under chauvinistic myth as their father did. "There's a new bus now" he proclaims, "and we're driving it, and we're picking everyone up, and we can go ANYWHERE!"
