Juan is a troubled teenager living and growing up in the “ruff ” parts of Los Angeles who realizes he has to help support his family. While working in a wrecking yard to make ends meet, Juan is also trying to fit in at his “hard-core” City school among his many different classmates and avoid being constantly tormented by the school bully. He struggles to pull himself out of his economic problems by utilizing his artistic ability learned from his graffiti street knowledge. When Juan discove...

Winner of:The Pulitzer PrizeThe National Book Critics Circle AwardThe Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardThe Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel PrizeA Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the YearOne of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century**One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Bost...

In this "raucous, moving, and necessary" story by a Pulitzer Prize finalist (San Francisco Chronicle), the De La Cruzes, a family on the Mexican-American border, celebrate two of their most beloved relatives during a joyous and bittersweet weekend."All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death."In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summo...

A powerful contemporary YA set in Argentina, about a rising soccer star who must put everything on the line—even her blooming love story—to follow her dreams. Perfect for fans of The Poet X and I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.In Rosario, Argentina, Camila Hassan lives a double life.At home, she is a careful daughter, living within her mother’s narrow expectations, in her rising-socc...

In this moving, emotional narrative of love and resilience, a young couple confronts the start of Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s, and a daughter searches for truth twenty years later.New York, 1998**.** Santiago Larrea, a wealthy Argentine diplomat, is holding court alongside his wife, Lila, and their daughter, Paloma, a college student and budding jewelry designer, at their annual summer polo match and soiree. All seems perfect in the...

From the beloved and award-winning author Junot Díaz, a spellbinding saga of a family’s journey through the New World.A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot Díaz's exhilarating talents. It also introduced an unforgettable narrator— Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his family’s precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of industrial New Jersey, and their epic passage fr...

**A Latino detective in upstate New York investigates a murder among the town’s immigrant community in this “**fascinating, multidimensional” crime thriller (Publishers Weekly).A split-second decision thrusts Detective Jimmy Vega into the epicenter of a disturbing case when the body of a newborn is found near an immigrant community center in upscale Lake Holly, NY. As he behins his investigation, the cold-bloodedness of the crime and the innocence of the v...

A Hispanic detective wades through accusations, bigotry, and fear when a teenage girl disappears in this novel from “a tremendous talent” (Lee Child).A blond-haired, blue-eyed teenager from a prominent family vanishes after teaching English to a group of immigrants. Suspicion falls on the men she was tutoring, inflaming tensions in the close-knit, picturesque community of Lake Holly, New York. For Detective Jimmy Vega, more is at stake than just keeping the peace. ...

The award-winning memoir of life in an LA street gang from the acclaimed Chicano author and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate: "Fierce, and fearless" ( The New York Times).Luis J. Rodríguez joined his first gang at age eleven. As a teenager, he witnessed the rise of some of the most notorious cliques in Southern California. He grew up knowing only a life of violence—one that revolved around drugs, gang wars, and police brutality. But unlike most of those ar...

"'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 thinn...

Winner of the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children's Book Award For twelve-year-old Diego and his family, home is a prison in Cochabamba, Bolivia. His parents farmed coca, a traditional Bolivian medicinal plant, until they got caught in the middle of the government's war on drugs and were mistakenly convicted of drug possession. Diego's parents are locked up, but he can come and go: to school, to the market to sell his mother's handknitted goods, and to work as a "taxi," running errands for o...

USBBY Oustanding International Books selection After he finally manages to escape from being a virtual slave in an illegal cocaine operation, Diego is taken in by the Ricardo family -- poor coca farmers who provide a safe haven while he recovers from his ordeal in the jungle. But even that brief respite comes to an end when the army moves in and destroys the family's coca crop -- and their livelihood. Diego eventually joins the cocaleros as they protest the destruction of their crops by ba...