Meche y las ballenas: A novel for intermediate learners of Spanish (Spanish Edition)

Meche splits her time between her father´s home in Baja California Sur, Mexico and her mother’s family in San Diego, USA. She helps her father run boat tours of the whale birthing lagoons in San Ignacio, Baja California Sur. Every year grey whales migrate to these lagoons from the Arctic Ocean in order to give birth to their babies. While Meche is a legal resident of two countries, she feels like an outsider in both. “Neither from here nor there”, is how Meche responds when people ask her where she is from. When the whale habitat is threatened by plans to develop a large scale salt mining operation, Meche plays a role in saving the lagoon and finds her place in a community that embraces her for reasons more profound than the color of her passport. This fictional story is set within the context of the real history of a small Mexican community that attracted the attention of the world in order to save the habitat of the grey whales. It was written for intermediate learners of Spanish. This inspiring story may appeal to readers with an interest in the environment, transborder cultural identities and heritage learners of Spanish. There are footnotes for words that are typically unknown to intermediate students, a full Spanish-English glossary of every word in the novel, and 57 illustrations embedded within the text to help the reader.