Francisco Jimenez

He was born in Tlaquepaque, Mexico, in 1943, Francisco Jiménez grew up in a family of migrant workers in California. He spent much of his childhood moving around California with no permanent home or regular schooling, yet he went on to have a distinguished academic career. He graduate of Santa Clara University, he also attended Harvard University and received both a Master's Degree and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He went on to become chairman of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Santa Clara University, as well as director of the Division of Arts and Humanities there, and has been director of the Mexico Summer Study Program at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Long a writer of academic works for adults, Jiménez's entry into writing for young people came through an award-winning short story, “The Circuit,” based on his childhood. In 1997, Jiménez combined the story with others into the autobiographical volume The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child, which won numerous awards, including the Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature. He followed this achievement with the picture book La Mariposa, another autobiographical work that looks at the difficulties faced by a non-English-speaking child in an English-speaking classroom. His exploration of the melding or memoir and fiction continued with The Christmas Gift/El regalo de Navidad, a bilingual illustrated book about the sources of humanity and strength that exist even in the face of poverty. His newest book is Breaking Through, his award-winning sequel to The Circuit.His primary goal in writing both scholarly and creative works is to fill the need for cultural and human understanding, between the United States and Mexico in particular, writer and professor Francisco Jiménez once commented. He has taken a major step towards this goal with his autobiographical collection The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. This award-winning book provides young readers with an intimate portrait of life growing up in a Mexican American migrant family. In depicting both the hardships and the hopes of Mexicans who move through California in search of work, The Circuit "fills a void in novels for young people," a New Advocate reviewer stated. Jiménez was born in Mexico in 1943, the second child in a family that would eventually include nine children. When he was just four, he and his older brother Roberto entered the United States with his parents, who were seeking to escape the poverty of their small Mexican village.Some of the books that he wrote were: The Circuit, Breakin Through, Cajas de Carton, Reaching Out, La Mariposa, and Mariposa.