Kiowa County Public Library District

"'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.

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 young ranch hand helps a family deal with the painful secrets they are hiding in their pasts.

"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...