Writer-in-Residence at Pasadena City College: Reyna Grande (2012)

Juana Garcia leaves her small town in Mexico to find her father who left his home and family to find work in the United States. Out of money and in need of someone to help her across the border, Juana meets Adelina Vasquez, who left her family in California to follow her lover in Mexico. Together they offer each other much needed material and spiritual support.

From the American Book Award-winning author comes this novel that follows a friendship among four women in Los Angeles, who are bound together by their Mexican roots and their love of Folklorico dance.

When Reyna Grande's father leaves his wife and three children behind in a village in Mexico to make the dangerous trek across the border to the United States, he promises he will soon return from "El Otro Lado" (The Other Side) with enough money to build them a dream house where they can all live together. His promises become harder to believe as months turn into years. When he summons his wife to join him, Reyna and her siblings are deposited in the already overburdened household of their stern, unsmiling grandmother. The three siblings are forced to look out for themselves; in childish games they find a way to forget the pain of abandonment and learn to solve very adult problems. When their mother at last returns, the reunion sets the stage for a dramatic new chapter in Reyna's young life: her own journey to "El Otro Lado" to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father.