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"Rafa's first flight, a late-night joy ride with his brother, changes their lives forever when the engine stops and the boys crash land, with "Texas to the right; Mexico to the left." Before the accident, Rafa was a high school track star in Harlingen, Texas, even though he was undocumented like the rest of his family. His mother Araceli spent her time waiting for her husband to return after being deported. His older brother Uli, a former high-school track star turned drop-out, learned to fly a crop duster, spraying pesticide over their home in the citrus grove. After the crash, Uli wakes up bound and gagged, wondering where he is. Rafa comes to in a hospital, praying that it's on the American side of the border. And their mother finds herself waiting for her sons as well as her missing husband. Araceli knows that she has to go back to the country she left behind in order to find her family. In Mexico, each is forced to navigate the complexities of their past and an unknown world of deprivation and violence. Ruthless drug cartels force Uli to fly drugs, threatening to kill his mother. They have photos of her in Matamoros to prove they can enforce the threat. Meanwhile, Rafa returns to his family's home in San Miguel and finds a city virtually abandoned, devastated by battles between soldiers and narcotraficantes. Vividly portraying the impact of international drug smuggling on the average person, Peña's debut novel also probes the loss of talented individuals and the black market machines fed with the people removed and shut out of America. Ultimately, Bang is a riveting tale about ordinary people forced to do dangerous, unimaginable things"-- Provided by publisher

A series of poems keyed to the cards in the traditional Mexican lottery game explore growing up Mexican-American in Texas, from enjoying afternoon snacks, climbing mesquite trees, and sharing Catholic traditions to enduring discrimination.

Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, takes a second piercing look at his past through a startling new lens: hunger. The need for sustenance originating in childhood poverty, the adolescent emotional need for solace and comfort, the adult desire for a larger world, another lover, a different body-all are explored by Gonzalez in a series of heartbreaking and poetic vignettes. Each vignette is a defining moment of self-awareness, every moment an important step in a lifelong journey toward clarity, knowledge, and the nourishment that comes in various forms-even ""the smallest biggest joys"" help piece together a complex portrait of a gay man of colour who at last defines himself by what he learns, not by what he yearns for.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments Prologue Beautiful City of Tirzah White Among the Broken Angels Hardwood Monster Relics Windows Man in a Box Ash Rings One Prayer Undercurrent Confluence Wreath.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

When his father died, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher wasn't quite two. His mother packed up his father's belongings, put the boxes in a hall closet, and closed the door. The "man in a box" remained a mystery, hardly mentioned, and making only rare appearances in stories when Fletcher or his siblings inquired. Meanwhile, his young Hispanic mother transformed herself into an artist, scouting the back roads and secondhand shops of New Mexico for relics and unlikely treasures to add to her "little shrines, " or descansos. "Look closely, " she'd say to her son. "Everything tells a story." This book is Fletcher's literary descanso, a piecing together-from moments and objects and words-of a father's life, of the life lived without that father, and of his own mixed-race identity. Fletcher's reflections unfold like a collage, offering a rich array of images and stories of life with his single mother, organizing weekend family car trips to explore graveyards and adobe ruins; of growing up on the fault lines of class and culture; of being a father who never had one of his own to learn from. From incidents and observations, Fletcher assembles a beautifully crafted portrait of his family's unspoken affliction with loss over the decades, a portrait that finally evokes the father at its heart.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Part I : The purple crayon -- Part II : Mais, je suis chicano! -- Part III : Juárez is burning -- Part IV : The the -- Part V : Hotel Juárez.

In this collection of short and flash fiction, Daniel Chacon examines peoples' interactions with each other, the impact of identity and the importance of literature, art and music. In one story, a girl remembers her father, who taught her to love books and libraries. "A book can whisper at you, call at you from the shelves. Sometimes a book can find you. Seek you out and ask you to come and play," he told her. Years later, she finds herself pulling an assortment from the shelves, randomly reading passages from different books and entering into the landscapes as if each book were a wormhole. Somehow one excerpt seems to be a continuation of another, connecting in the way that birds do when they fly from a tree to the roof of a house, making "an idea, a connection, a tree-house."

• Disc one. Feature film
• Disc two. Extras.

An extended Argentine family eagerly awaits the gifts and letters from a son who has gone to Paris, even though most of them know that his siblings are the ones sending the items in order to keep their invalid mother from worrying too much.

Raul Luis "Ruly" Cruz is a young Mexican American who lives in El Paso, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico, home of his an-cestors and some of his current relatives. As he grows from awkward adolescent to manhood, he negotiates the precarious borders of family, tradition, and identity trying to find his own place in the Chicano community and in the larger world. This is an engaging and moving story of growing up in a borderland that is not only geographical but cultural as well.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)