The Great Monroe High School Fire is based upon events surrounding the unsolved arson fire that did major damage to James Monroe High School in the South Bronx over thirty years ago. The characters are inspired by the young people who learned how to survive in that era of gangs, drugs, and failing educational schools. The narrator, Joey Sanchez, lives in the worlds of both his Italian mother and his absent Puerto Rican father and is influenced by very different people. There is his impoverished mother whom he cannot bear to disappoint. And there is his closest friend Sapo who joins him in a frenzy of graffiti writing while they are still at Junior High 22, and who later nearly gets both of them killed in a drug deal gone wrong.