Jesse

Jesse is a young adult novel written by Gary Soto and published in 1994. The novel uses first-person perspective to bring readers on a journey through evolving faith and growing up in an uncertain world. Drawing on historical allusions, Soto utilizes tropes from both young adult fiction and the historical fiction genre. Soto is the author of several young adult novels and collections of poetry. He was the first Mexican American student to earn an MFA at the University of California, Irvine. Soto has won several awards and honoraria, including the Phoenix Award for Jesse.

Plot Summary

At 17 years old, Jesse moves out of his mother and stepfather’s house and drops out of high school. He moves into an apartment with his 21-year-old brother, Abel. Abel helps Jesse enroll in junior college to hopefully study art. Both Jesse and Abel attend junior college during the week and work as manual field laborers on the weekends (picking cotton and fruit). Jesse dreams of being an artist, traveling around the world, and providing a more secure life for his mother—in a time period fraught with tension. As a Mexican American field laborer, he is directly connected to César Chávez’s United Farm Workers Union and the emerging Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s.