Home | Learning Tools | Language Arts Corner: Crash Boom Love

Don't know how it all started. The frozen feeling,
This fender inside wanting to crash against everything.
Blown out blue night. My face.

With Crash Boom Love, poet and professor Juan Herrera has provided a powerful and illuminating voice to a generation of youth across America. Intense, riveting and powerful, the award-winning novel, written entirely in verse, is the story of Cesar Garcia, a 16 year-old boy whose life in a southern California migrant town is becoming increasingly self-destructive. Recently abandoned by his father, Cesar and his Mama Lucy find themselves alone, attempting to make sense of their lives without Papi's reassurance of a brighter future. Neither the lulling of Selena's voice or the mind-numbing effects of drugs or alcohol are enough to bring Cesar anything but a moment's relief from the incessant challenges for power, friendship, girls, comfort, and repose.

Laden with intense themes, Crash Boom Love is not a light read. However, in addition to increasing cultural awareness and recognition, the novel readily provides the springboard for rich discussion involving delicate and critical issues including cultural understanding, conflict resolution, community, friendship, gangs, drug, and alcohol use.

This compelling novel is sure to resonate strongly among high school readers for its riveting account of the life of a young boy struggling every day to hold onto memories of his father, his culture, and his dignity during volatile times

Suggested Accompanying Activities

 Style analysis
As the story is written in verse, it provides countless opportunities for class discussion and observation of the author's unique style and use of language. Discuss the author's use of:

• Subjective imagery
• Tone
• Symbolism
• Use of both Spanish and English languages and how this affects the story
  verse and why the author chose to write in this fashion
• Mysterious and compelling chapter titles

 Character analysis
Discuss how the character changes from the beginning of the story to the end.
How does the tone, imagery change from the beginning of the story to the end and parallel the change in Cesar.

Writing Activity
Teacher-led modeling series of mini-lessons on the writing of a significant personal experience.
Model the writing in verse as well as the incorporation of various stylistic devices.
Assign students to write about a significant experience in verse.

About the Author

Renowned poet, Juan Felipe Herrera is currently teaching Chicano Studies at California State University at Fresno. He has received two Pushcart Prize Poetry nominations, the Smithsonian Notable Children's Book Award, the Ezra Jack Keats Award, the Americas Award, and an Academy of American Poets nomination for the William Carlos Williams Poetry Award. He founded the multimedia poetry theatre, Teatro Tolteca, in Los Angeles in 1971 and the poetry percussion troupe, TROCA, in San Francisco in 1983. Herrera also appeared at the 1998 Chicago Humanities Festival, He/She.

Other Books by the Author

Exiles of Desire, 1985.
The Roots of a Thousand Embraces,1994.
Calling the Doves/El Canto De Las Palomas, 1995 — poetic picture-book memoir charting the landscapes of Herrera's childhood heartland.
Love After the Riots, 1996.
Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America, 1997 — a narrative poem recounting how the Mayan people have survived over the centuries
Laughing Out Loud, I Fly, 1997— poems in English and Spanish.
Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream, 1999
Thunderweavers, 2000 — a bilingual homage in poetry to Mayan villagers killed in Chiapas in 1997.
The Upside Down Boy/El Nino de Cabeza, 2000.
Loteria Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives, with Mexican artist Artemio Rodriguez, 2000.

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