GCC Reads-- A Place to Stand

Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire offers a compelling and unprecedented look at what life is like for those refugees living on the Mexican side of the border--a world that is only some twenty miles from San Diego, but that few have; Urrea gives us a compassionate and candid account of his work as a member and "official translator" of a crew of relief workers that provided aid to the many refugees hidden just behind the flashy tourist spots of Tijuana. His account of the struggle of these people to survive amid abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and the legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands explains without a doubt the reason so many are forced to make the dangerous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States. More than just an expose, Across the Wire is a tribute to the tenacity of a people who have learned to survive against the most impossible odds, and returns to these forgotten people their pride and their identity.

The award-winning and bestselling classic memoir about a young Chicano gang member surviving the dangerous streets of East Los Angeles, now featuring a new introduction by the author. Winner of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, hailed as a New York Times notable book, and read by hundreds of thousands, Always Running is the searing true story of one man's life in a Chicano gang--and his heroic struggle to free himself from its grip. By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East Los Angeles gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests and then watched with increasing fear as gang life claimed friends and family members. Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and the power of words and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation. Achieving success as an award-winning poet, he was sure the streets would haunt him no more--until his young son joined a gang. Rodriguez fought for his child by telling his own story in Always Running, a vivid memoir that explores the motivations of gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that inevitably claim its participants. At times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.

One Navajo family, on a New Mexico reservation, struggles to survive in a world no longer theirs in the years just before and after World War II.

A love story. A journey in search of self. A meditation on our frightening times. With Mother Tongue, Demetria Martínez gives us all these and more, in an unforgettable novel infused with the color, sunlight, and cool shadows of the world her two lovers inhabit. Told in the cadences of a poet, with the unsparing honesty of a woman looking back on the most important decision of her life, the events in Mother Tongue unfold with the urgency, the inevitability, of destiny. Mary is nineteen and living alone in Albuquerque. Adrift in the wake of her mother's death, she longs for something meaningful to take her over. Vulnerable to love and game for anything, Mary knows she has found the other part of herself when Jose Luis enters her life. A refugee from El Salvador and its vicious and bloody civil war, José Luis has been smuggled to the United States as part of the sanctuary movement that is attempting to expose the plight of thousands of citizens being harassed, tortured, and disappeared by a United States-supported military government. Mary cannot help but fall in love with the movement and the man who represents it for her--his strength, his sadness, and the life he has left behind. And little by little, she begins to reveal to José Luis the hope that always lives in love. Though violent times conspire against Mary's dreams, she is about to lay claim to a part of herself she has never known.