Maria tries on her mother's wedding ring while helping make tamales for a Christmas family get-together. Panic ensues when hours later, she realizes the ring is missing.

Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken,...

A young girl enjoys the similarities and the differences between her English-speaking and Spanish-speaking grandparents.

A Mixteca Indian from Oaxaca, América Soliz, suffers from the poverty and hopelessness of her Chicago ghetto, made more endurable by a desire and determination to be a poet.

In a small New Mexico town, fourteen-year-old C.M. helps take care of her great-grandmother, who tells stories of her star-crossed life, making C.M. realize that she is not so different from those who came before her.

Josefina and her sisters are excited when energetic young Aunt Dolores arrives at the rancho, bringing new ideas, new fashions, and new challenges, but they worry the changes will make them forget Mamá, especially as Christmas approaches.

A young girl describes her feelings when her father decides to leave their home in Mexico to look for work in the United States.

In Silver Springs, Arizona, her mother's stories of the monstrous La Llorona are thrilling but unbelievable to science-loving Paola until she and her best friends Dante and Emma take a walk through a cactus field near the Gila River.

When Chavela blows a bubble with a strange new gum, she floats away to Mexico, where her great-grandfather once worked harvesting the tree sap that makes gum chewy.

Sofia grows up in the close-knit community of the barrio in McAllen, Texas, then finds that her experiences as a scholarship student at an Episcopal boarding school in Austin only strengthen her ties to family and her "comadres."