During Adriane Brown’s career as a teacher in California and Maryland, she saw firsthand how fear of deportation can affect the children of undocumented immigrants. Her novel exploring the subject, which she wrote over a 10-year period, was published this fall. Photo courtesy of Adriane Brown

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As a longtime public-school teacher in Montgomery County, Adriane Brown of Chevy Chase often worked with children of undocumented immigrants.

Brown remembers one bright Central American boy who learned English in kindergarten and by first grade was a strong reader.

“Then, in second grade, everything started falling apart,” Brown, 71, recalled in an interview with the Beacon. “The boy was nervous. He was forgetting things.

“His father, who was non-documented from Honduras, was being threatened with being deported. The son, 7 years old, was afraid his father would be taken away.

“Many students of undocumented parents are affected that way. You could see it on their faces, on the faces of their parents,” said Brown, now retired. “I knew I wanted to share this story.”

Brown’s unsettling experiences with undocumented children and their parents in and out of the classroom drove her to the keyboard to present their experiences through a novel. She published The Café on Dream Street this fall.

Inspired by events

Brown’s 30-year classroom experience included some 20 years at local schools such as Beall (seven years) Elementary, Twinbrook in Rockville, Sligo Creek Elementary in Silver Spring (six years), and Germantown Elementary.

She also spent seven years teaching in California, having received a master’s degree in special education from San Francisco State University.

“I saw firsthand how the fear of arrest and the actual deportations affected students’ lives and interrupted their ability to learn,” Brown said.

She was also inspired to write the novel after learning about the treatment of day laborers, many of them undocumented, in and around the D.C. area, as well as across the country.

She remembers learning about a time in 2007 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided a factory in New Bedford, Mass., where hundreds of workers in the country illegally were being employed.

“ICE arrested many of the factory workers who were parents of children in a nearby day care center. Nobody picked up the children,” Brown said. “I heard about this, and I was shocked. It was another hit to my conscience that made me write about the situation.”

The story and a mystery

Brown took 10 years to write the 484-page novel. She would wake at 5:30 a.m. to get in some writing before starting the school day, spend weekends working on the book, and put words and plot together during vacations.

The plot revolves around two characters: Felipe Sanchez is an undocumented immigrant who escaped the civil war in El Salvador when he was a child, 20 years ago. Now a hardworking, loving father and husband, he has big plans to expand his café in the fictitious town of Oakmont, N.Y.

Frank Sullivan, also of Oakmont, spends his days and nights with crooked cops, looking for ways to rid his town of undocumented immigrants.

“You let them hang out in the mall today, they’ll be movin’ into the neighborhood tomorrow, takin’ your job the next day,” Sullivan says in the book. “They want what we have, and they’ll take it if we let ‘em. Laws don’t mean nothing to them. Hell, they got here by breakin’ the law.”

One day, Sanchez disappears without a trace.

While the novel is self-published — meaning, among other things, the author has poured thousands of dollars into its online appearance — it won a first place in the Maryland Writers Association 2021 novel competition in the mainstream/literary fiction category and has received positive reviews on Amazon.

“The Café on Dream Street is a highly sensitive portrayal of one of the most burning issues of our time. The compelling story will capture your heart,” wrote Amazon reviewer Cindy Hallberlin, board chair of AsylumWorks, a D.C.-based volunteer organization that helps asylum-seekers.

Brown also wrote a study guide for her book for high school students. That was requested by the mid-Atlantic chapter of Reforma, a national organization that promotes library and information services for Spanish speakers.

Plans for a sequel

Brown seems eager to enter the category of teacher-turned-novelist (a classification that has included, among others, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kurt Vonnegut and Dan Brown).

She said some readers of her first novel have coaxed her to continue writing fiction, so she has begun a sequel to The Café on Dream Street.

“I’ve started working on the first chapter and am enthusiastic about applying all I’ve learned during the writing of my first book,” she said.

“It has been an amazing learning curve and hopefully will be easier the second time around!”

The book and its study guide can be purchased on Amazon or at adrianebrown.com.