The Confessional is a book about racism and the interaction of teens from one of El Paso’s elite private 
school.
The story is seen through the eyes of eight teens from Jesuit High School, a fictional name that is based on El Paso’s Cathedral High School. The lives of the teens get entangled upon the death of a character.
The story begins with a letter, written by a Mexican man tired of all the abuse he has endured, to the president of the United States. The next day, the man detonates a bomb strapped to his body on the Santa Fe Bridge, killing 32 Americans, 16 Mexicans and injuring 100 more. By the way, this happens on May 5th. That’s right, Cinco de Mayo.
The character, Mackenzie Malone, writes a letter to the El Paso Times to express his discontent with the Cinco de Mayo celebrations, just a year after the tragic incident.
That day Malone assaults a Mexican student in school. That night, Malone is found dead.
Turmoil and unrest plague the school, as students try to decipher how they feel about the incident. Opinions and ideals clash as students begin taking sides and turning
against each other.
The author J.L. Powers, a former English Professor at EPCC, who still teaches online courses from her home in California uses the terms “Fronchies and Whites,” to represent the sides in conflict.
Racist cliques begin to form, which converts the school into a war zone.
Powers uses a great technique of writing and develops six main first-person voices, MacKenzie Malone, Isaiah Contreras, Alexander Gold, Daniel Tucker, Gregory Gonzalez and Jim Hill, all students at Jesuit. However, they seem to be stereotyped..
She intends to portray the borderland’s entire mystique through all of these characters.
The “terrorist” who blows himself up on the bridge, is a Mexican-chile picker who is tired of being excessively searched every time he crosses the bridge to work. He also grieves over the death of his wife, a “maquila” worker, who is one of Juarez’s many disappeared women.
Malone is portrayed as a rich Caucasian who believes that Mexicans are taking over his country and that anything that is not American is evil.
Another Caucasian character is an in-the-closet homosexual that fears for his reputation, while preparing his sets on his hard-core rock band.
The son of a military man whose mother is of Middle Eastern descent is relieved that Hispanics are the new terrorists, instead of Middle Easterners.
Another involved character is a Caucasian who has been in and out of juvenile detention, whose mother is a waitress and whose sister is the town slut.
Quiet, ignored but observant is the character that knows everything about the other students.
The Hispanic rich kid from Juarez is viewed by Americans as a drug cartel connection.
The author tries extremely hard to incorporate all aspects of border life into her book.
She saturates the personalities of the characters with an overload of information.
Chico’s Tacos is also mentioned in the story, as that is one of the few things people believe El Paso has to offer.
Being raised in El Paso and Albuquerque, the author will give non-El Paso residents something that seems convincing, as well as an inside-look of what the border life is really like.
It saddens me though, that a writer from El Paso would mislead her readers about the border in that fashion.
Even though realistic issues are portrayed in the book, it’s the stereotyping that causes the informed reader to lose interest on those issues.
