Mexican WhiteBoy is a 2008 novel by Matt de la Peña, published by Delacorte Press.

[1] De la Peña drew on his own adolescent passion for sports[2] in developing his main character Danny, a baseball enthusiast.

Danny Lopez, the protagonist, is a shy and introverted young teenager from San Diego who attends Leucadia Prep.

They decide to hustle some local baseball player from San Diego high schools by challenging the hitters to get a hit off Danny's pitching.

Danny gets a phone call from his mother in San Francisco, who tells him about the superficial beauty of the city and how she and Julia, his sister, are enjoying themselves with Randy, his mom's boyfriend.

After some time, his mother begins to cry to him about how she feels lonely in San Francisco and misses Danny and their home in Leucadia.

A New York Times reviewer described de la Peña's characterization of Danny as "remarkably human", and his treatment of the themes of self-discovery as "never corny, sentimental or sappy.

feel like outsiders among the hard-edged kids of National City," a reviewer for The School Library Journal noted.

The issues of biculturalism in Mexican WhiteBoy and other works were the subject of a conference presentation by the author at the University of Arizona's 2010 Tucson Festival of Books.

State officials claimed the book contained "critical race theory", which they deemed as "promoting racial resentment".

[7] Some students and their parents sued the authorities, claiming that when the Tucson Unified School District banned the Mexican American studies program, they were violating their rights under the First and 14th amendments.

In August 2017, A. Wallace Tashima, a federal judge, ruled that on both counts, the students and parents had their rights violated.