A multi-generational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancy--the very stuff of life.

"'La frontera'... I heard it for the first time back in the late 1940s when Papa and Mama told me and Roberto, my older brother, that someday we would take a long trip north, cross la front era, enter California, and leave our poverty behind." So begins this honest and powerful account of a family's journey to the fields of California - to a life of constant moving, from strawberry fields to cotton fields, from tent cities to one-room shacks, from...

This story is an unflinching vision of the menace of adolescence, the hard edge of physical labor, and the debts we owe to family.

"Cousins Mari, Erica, Selena, and Gracie are inseparable. They aren’t just family but best friends—sharing secrets, traditions, and a fierce love for their abuelita. But their idyllic childhood ends when Mari’s parents divorce, forcing her to move away. With Mari gone, the girls’ tight-knit bond unravels. Fifteen years later, Mari’s got the big house and handsome husband, but her life is in shambles. Erica’s boyfriend just dumped her,...

Two young Mexican American migrant workers in California find hope in love, despite the poverty and social conditions in which they live.

Bajo la alambrada -- Soledad -- De dentro hacia afuera -- Un milagro en Tent City -- El ǹgel de oro -- El aguinaldo -- Muerte perdonada -- El costal de algodn̤ -- Cajas de carton̤ -- El juego de la patada -- Tener y retener -- Peregrinos inmv̤iles. Francisco Jimenez chronicles the experiences he had after his family left Mexico for California when he was just a child.

Mama Fela, a skilled seamstress, is the aging matriarch of the Romero clan in Santa Lucia, a small town in northeastern New Mexico at the height of the Great Depression. Her six-year-old granddaughter and constant companion, Cipriana, delights in the Shirley Temple movies that occasionally come to the town's theater. Through Cipriana's eyes, we see her parents' struggles over money. Graciela, Cipriana's mother, is a teacher in a rural school system...

"Tome is a small, outwardly sleepy hamlet in central New Mexico. In Ana Castillo's hands, though, it stands wondrously revealed as a place of marvels, teeming with life and with all manner of collisions: the past with the present, the real with the supernatural, the comic with the horrific, the Native American with the Hispano with the Anglo, the women with the men. With the talkative, intimate voice and the stylistic and narrative freedom of a Southwestern...