Paloma, the protagonist of Carolina Ixta’s second book, Few Blue Skies (Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins, Feb. 3), is on a mission. A high school senior in a small California town comprised mostly of Mexican immigrant families like her own, she is determined to prevent a mega-corporation from building another warehouse that would add to the toxic air pollution that has already severely compromised the health of townspeople. Her boyfriend Julio’s father recently died of lung cancer, and her own father is sick. Paloma learns, however, that there are more shades of gray than she’d realized.

Ixta, whose first book, Shut Up, This Is Serious, won the Pura Belpré Award, is the daughter of Mexican immigrants to California. She is also a teacher and a lifelong writer. Ever since college, Ixta says, she “wanted to write a book on environmental justice,” but she never expected it to be so difficult to pull together her research on the warehousing industry, local history, environmental movements, labor injustice, and more—plus a tumultuous love story. “It felt like I was constantly solving a Rubik’s cube!” Kirkus spoke with Ixta from her home in Oakland, California. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you begin writing?

I started when I was 8. I wrote competitively as a child for a Reading Rainbow contest, which was the first time someone read my work, and I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life. In high school, I did the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. For the novel writing category, I would write a book every year!

But I was raised by a teacher and have a big heart for public education, so I became an elementary school teacher. I wrote my first book during my first year of teaching. My time as an educator is intrinsic to my work as a writer. My students have taught me a tremendous amount about what it means to find something engaging, to sink your teeth into a book.

How did this calling—writing a book on environmental justice—come to be?

When I was a junior in college, I took a class called Eco Poetry to fulfill a graduation requirement, and I remember really dragging my feet because I figured the environment was just a science issue, and I was always more of a humanities, artsy person. But it was one of the most eye-opening classes ever.

We discussed the environment as a canvas for society and discussed how it is intrinsic and intersectional to issues about race and gender and justice. We also got into class issues—like how Styrofoam was banned in the Bay Area but is one of the most accessible, affordable ways to get cheap utensils for low-income, usually Black and brown, communities. We were forced to think past our easy assumptions and had to start thinking about issues that were local to us.

Why air pollution in particular?

I had spent a lot of time in the Inland Empire during my childhood, but when I went back as an adult, it looked really different. I realized it was being overtaken by warehouses, and I later learned that they were responsible for a lot of pollution, like carbon emissions. They were owned by companies with large distribution centers there. They were really taking advantage of the workforce, many of whom can’t afford the right respiratory masks—or asthma or lung cancer treatments when they eventually get sick.

I love Paloma’s character. She is passionate and well-intentioned and very human.

I wanted her to represent someone who thinks she knows what the right answer is. Her friends try. Her best friend, Alejandra, is a great character who says, “I don’t think you understand that some people like me, we don’t have a choice.” But I think her situation with Julio is what finally allows her to unwind some and say, “I cannot possibly know it all.” Paloma, despite being very intelligent, can be a bit self-absorbed. I think it’s when she nearly makes a choice that would uproot someone’s dream that she can finally think, Maybe I’m wrong. Sometimes you take the blood money because you need to go to university, you need to feed your family. Sometimes you don’t, because you have the privilege of saying, “I’m not going to do that.” I think what’s so fascinating about movements [for] justice, particularly strikes, is that we’re so busy pointing the finger at one another, saying, “You crossed the strike” [or] “You’re organizing the strike,” that we forget to point the finger at the people who are responsible.

You approach themes like collaboration or selling out with great insight and nuance.

It was a deliberate choice. I had no name for this town for a long time, and I finally landed on San Fermin, named after the saint of bulls. Bulls became a huge theme for me in the book. I wanted bulls because of rodeo culture, but I also wanted to touch on how people in social movements are so bullheaded and obstinate.

Not everyone has that perspective.

My grandfather came to this country as part of the Bracero Program, a program for Mexican laborers [during World War II and after]. He would make money and send it back to my mother’s family in Mexico. But he was a strikebreaker during a time when many people were organizing to advocate for the rights of farm workers. When I went to university and studied the United Farm Workers Movement, it was depicted rightfully as a movement that got a lot of these young Latino men and women rights, but so much had been forgotten. There were many Mexican laborers trying to make ends meet who were brutally harassed because they were just trying to make a dollar, my grandfather among them. I felt a splinter of resentment for the way it was all depicted, because it felt so aligned with the people who were organizing, even though I get it, and I think they were right to organize.

Then I started teaching Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan to my students every year, which is set during the Depression and is about the same thing. There’s a group of young people who are organizing to get paid more for picking cotton, and Esperanza is a young girl who has just come from Mexico and has lost her entire life. Her house has burned down, her father has died, her mother has pneumonia, she has no money. She thinks, I have to go to work and I have to be a strike breaker. Every year when I teach the book I ask, “Who’s right? Is it Marta, who’s organizing the strike? Is it Esperanza, who chooses to cross the picket line?” Every year my students can’t decide. They say, “Well, the stakes are so high for both. One wants better conditions for her workers and her family, and the other needs to make a dollar so she can buy her mother’s medicine.” It’s a really interesting question. The best questions are not ones where you can pick the answer out of a book and say, “On page 10, it says the sky is blue.” They’re the ones that have no closed answer.

Christine Gros-Loh is the author of Parenting Without Borders and The Path.