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Cross over water

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.

Online EBSCO University Press

Cross over water

Yanez deftly explores the coming-of-age of Raul Luis Cruz, a Mexican American teenager who grows up in El Paso, just across the Rio Grande from Juarez, still home to many of his relatives. At 12, after his mother gets a promotion, Raul and his family moves to a northern suburb, a step up from the Lower Valley where he grew up, leaving behind his beloved neighborhood 'like a lizard tail in the desert.' In high school, he finds his niche as team manager of the football team, and takes pride in his job bagging groceries at Big Way Foods. But after graduation, Raul knows he must 'evolve' into something more; the problem is knowing just which path to take. His new girlfriend, a college student from California, volunteering with the homeless in People's Park for the summer, opens up a new world to Raul, and steers him toward applying for community college. --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.

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

El Paso del Norte : stories on the border

The Chicano characters in Richard Yanez's debut story collection live in El Paso's Lower Valley but inhabit a number of borders-between two countries, two languages, and two cultures, between childhood and manhood, life and death. The teenaged narrator of "Desert Vista" copes with a new school and a first love while negotiating the boundaries between his family's tenuous middle-class status and the working-class community in which they have come to live. Tony Amoroza, the protagonist of "Amoroza Tires, " wrestles with the overwhelming grief from his wife's death until an unexpected legacy prompts him with new faith. Maria del Valle, "La Loquita, " the central character of "Lucero's Mkt., " crosses the border into madness while her neighbors watch, gossip, and try to offer-or refuse-aid. Yanez writes with perfect understanding of his borderland setting, a landscape where poverty and violence impinge on traditional Mexican-American values, where the signs of gang culture compete with the ageless rituals of the Church. His characters are vivid, unique, fully authentic, searching for purpose or identity, for hope or meaning, in lives that seem to deny them almost everything. Yanez's world is that of the Southwestern Chicanos, but the fears and yearnings of his characters are universal. This is the work of a deeply compassionate and highly skilled writer, and the stories are moving and powerful.