Have you heard of La Llorona? She is the most popular and infamous ghost in Latino folklore; in fact, the legend of La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, may be the oldest ghost story in the southwestern United States, South America, and Mexico. These images haunt the imaginations of millions of people.
A retelling, in parallel English and Spanish text, of the traditional tale told in the Southwest and in Mexico of how the beautiful Maria became a ghost.
From the author of Pulitzer-nominated The Devil’s Highway and national bestseller The Hummingbird’s Daughter comes an exquisitely composed collection of poetry on life at the border. Weaving English and Spanish languages as fluidly as he blends cultures of the southwest, Luis Urrea offers a tour of Tijuana, spanning from Skid Row, to the suburbs of East Los Angeles, to the stunning yet deadly Mojave Desert, to Mexico and the border fence itself. Mixing lyricism and colloquial voices, mysticism and the daily grind, Urrea explores duality and the concept of blurring borders in a melting pot society.
In the 1950s, fourteen-year-old Elena Padilla and her father move into a haunted house in Duston, Arizona, where only Elena can see and help the ghost of the young girl who died there.
This book of stories and recipes introduces two eccentric families that would never have eaten together, let alone exchanged recipes, but for the improbable marriage of the author’s parents: a nuevomexicano from Taos and a painter who came from Texas to New Mexico to study art. Recalling the good and the terrible cooks in her family, Anita Rodríguez also shares the complications of navigating a safe path among contradictory cultural perspectives. She takes us from the mountain villages of New Mexico in the 1940s to sipping mint juleps on the porch of a mansion in the South, and also on a prolonged pilgrimage to Mexico and back again to New Mexico. Accompanied by Rodríguez’s vibrant paintings—including scenes of people eating on fiesta nights and plastering an adobe church—Coyota in the Kitchen shows how food reflects the complicated family histories that shape our lives.