Fort Morgan Public Library

Seventy-year-old patriarch Big Angel de la Cruz is dying, and he wants to have one last birthday blowout. Unfortunately, his 100-year-old mother, America, dies the week of his party, so funeral and birthday are celebrated one day apart. The entire contentious, riotous de la Cruz clan descends on San Diego for the events--"High rollers and college students, prison veternaos and welfare mothers, happy kids and sad old-timers and pinches gringos and...

"A California epic following several native, diverse Californians grasping for air in a world that continues to marginalize them"-- Johnny Fra̕s has California in his blood. A descendant of the state's Indigenous people and Mexican settlers, he has Southern California's forgotten towns and canyons in his soul. He spends his days as a highway patrolman pulling over speeders, ignoring their racist insults, and pushing past the trauma of his rookie...

The non-fiction saga of Victor Villasenor's own family. It is the Hispanic Roots, an all-American story of poverty, immigration, struggle and success. Focuses on three generations of the Villasenor family, their spiritual and cultural roots back in Mexico, their immigration to California and their overcoming poverty, prejudice and economic exploitation

"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...

The author recalls his childhood in the mountains and valleys of California with his farmworker parents who inspired him with poetry and song.

"'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.

Follows the story of the author's father, Juan, who as a child witnessed the devastating effects of persecution and poverty on his once-noble Mexican family

The first time Isabel meets her father-in-law, Omar, he's already dead--an apparition appearing uninvited on her wedding day. Her husband, Martin, still unforgiving for having been abandoned by his father years ago, confesses that he never knew the old man had died. So Omar asks Isabel for the impossible: persuade Omar's family--especially his wife, Elda--to let him redeem himself. Isabel and Martin settle into married life in a Texas border town,...