This eclectic, gritty, and groundbreaking collection of short monologues features 21 of the most respected Latino authors writing today, including Sandra Cisneros, Oscar Hijuelos, Esmeralda Santiago, and Gary Soto. Their fictional narratives give voice to what it’s like to be a Latinx teen in America. These voices are yearning. These voices are angry. These voices are, above all else, hopeful. These voices are America.
This is a collection of poetry written by Chicano/Latino youths about their dreams, struggles, identity, hope and love.
Hector Robles has spent his sixteen years in the projects of El Paso trying to stay unnoticed. His peaceful obscurity is shattered when his impulsive brother challenges the leader of a gang called the Discípulos. Suddenly Hector is drawn into their world of violence and hopelessness. When a marker is placed on his life, Hector tries to escape by going away to a school for students with troubled pasts. But it isn’t easy to function when he’s paralyzed by the fear that they’ll find him, even there. Ultimately, by confronting external threats and the internal pain of his memories and mistakes, Hector begins to understand what manhood really means.
A dejected soldier makes a pact with the devil in this haunting, ultimately hopeful fairy tale. When a person gives up hope, is he still human? Such is the story of a soldier who has lost everything to war: his childhood home, his family and friends, his youth, and his innocence. Enter that sly opportunist, the devil, who wraps the soldier in the armor of a dead bear’s skin, fills its pockets with gold, and makes a dangerous and horrible wager.
Into the pattern of Ellen’s days, filled with dance practice and vacation plans, comes an unwelcome surprise: her mother has breast cancer. Suddenly her family’s life hinges on endless rounds of hospital visits and support groups, cancer nurses and chemotherapy. Ellen learns to cope with her mother’s illness as she helps uncover an ancient secret that holds special meaning for her. As they work and learn together, her friends and teachers guide her through her own healing process shaped by life-giving water and life-affirming dance. In Dancing Through the Shadows, Theresa Tomlinson describes a family faced with a devastating crisis.
Early in the twentieth century, ten-year-old Ben and his family live in the poorest part of their city with other Jewish immigrants. There is never enough money to make ends meet, so Ben, determined to do his part, lands a job delivering hat linings to a hat factory after school. He sets out on his boss’s bicycle feeling strong and free, and has a grand time until, on his way up Hill Street, he gets a harsh comeuppance, one that hurts his body and threatens to destroy his dreams as well. Based on the experiences of the author’s father and illustrated in Emily Arnold McCully’s signature style, this book celebrates a boy who nearly loses hope, but then learns that the future shines bright and full of second chances.
By the time WWII ended in Europe, the Blumenthal family–Marion, her brother Albert, and their parents–had lived in a succession of refugee, transit, and prison camps for more than six years, not only surviving but staying together. This memoir is written in spare, powerful prose that vividly depicts the endless degradation and humiliation suffered by the Holocaust’s innocent victims, as well as the unending horror of life in the camps.
After struggling with the death of her mother and father, Ursula worries about her beloved Aunt Dana who boarded a ship during very rough seas weeks ago and has not returned home, and finds herself faithfully waiting with fear and hope.
“‘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 frontera, 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 picking grapes to topping carrots and thinning lettuce. Seen through the eyes of a boy who longs for an education and the right to call one palce home, this is a story of survival, faith, and hope. It is a journey that will open readers’ hearts and minds.
Ana’s story begins the day she is born with HIV, transmitted from her mother, who dies just a few years later. From then on, Ana’s childhood becomes a blur of secrets—about her illness, her family, and the abuse she endures. Shuffled from home to home, Ana rarely finds safety or acceptance. But after she falls in love and becomes pregnant at seventeen, she embarks on a journey that leads her to new beginnings, new sorrows, and new hope. Based on her work with UNICEF and inspired by the framework of one girl’s life, Jenna Bush tells the story of many children around the world who are excluded from basic care, support, and education. Resources at the back of this book share how you can help children like Ana and protect yourself and others.