Narrates the first- generation Mexican American girl, tracking the experiences of cultural displacement, the inheritance of generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at- risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents...

Nineteen-year-old Mary, longing for something meaningful in her life, agrees to help José Luis, a refugee from El Salvador who has been smuggled into the United States as part of a sanctuary movement, and immediately falls in love with both the movement and the man.

"Guapo pobrecito her grandmother calls him. The 'poor handsome man.' Professor Jeremiah Post, the poor handsome man, is in fact standing in the way of Alejandra 'Alex' Torres turning Loretta's, her grandmother's bar, into a viable business. The hot brainiac who sleeps in one of the upstairs tenant rooms already has all of her Mexican American family's admiration; she won't let him have the bar and building she needs to resurrect her career, too. Alex...

In Chingona, Mexican American activist Alma Zaragoza-Petty helps us claim our inner chingona, a Spanish term for ""badass woman."" Badassery can be an asset, especially when we face personal and collective trauma. Unleashing our inner chingona will help us imagine a just and healed world from the inside out.

"Prejudice and the social and economic status of Chicanos often form the backdrop for these haunting stories, but the central theme is the social and cultural values which shape women's lives and which they struggle against with varying degrees of success."--Amazon.com.