“Danny nods with a shy smile, aims his eyes at the asphalt. He feels the heat of [the girls’] stares and for a second he wishes he could morph into one of the ants zigzagging in and out of tiny crevices in the street. Their little lives, he thinks, totally off the radar.”

Danny has just arrived in National City and Sofia introduces him to her “girls.” They are precocious and forward and they stare at Danny in a way that makes him feel uncomfortable. The reader learns that Danny leads a much more sheltered life in a different part of town. He thinks how he looks broadcasts as much and he becomes very self-conscious. He wants to become invisible, unnoticeable like an ant.

“Danny’s brown. Half-Mexican brown. A shade darker than all the white kids at his private high school, Leucadia Prep. Up there, Mexican people do the under-the-table yard work and hide out in the hills because they’re in San Diego illegally. Only other people who share his shade are the lunch-line ladies, the gardeners, the custodians. But whenever Danny comes down here, to National City—where his dad grew up, where all his aunts and uncles and cousins still live—he feels pale. A full shade lighter. Albino almost. Less than.”

Danny attributes the color of his skin, which is too light in one community and too dark in the other, to his feelings of worthlessness. He believes he is invisible in Leucadia andis disregarded; while in National City, however, he sees himself as too light, making him inferior.In Leucadia, he sees Mexican immigrants in service jobs, working for cash. He judges them by the work they do and how he believes others look at them. Heequates himself to them on the basis of skin color and nothing more. Danny is young and does not yet understand the dignity work gives people, particularly when it allows them to take care of their families.The workers about which he speaks have most likely risked a great deal to be there for those jobs, regardless of how he perceives others see them.