TO LIVE AND DIE IN EL VALLE

The streets of El Valle, Arizona, a Southwest town with its own relentless heartbeat, are seen through the eyes of its fierce gente, who gather in living rooms, at Washington Park, and at the local Circle K, those who disappear tragically and those who got out on their own but always find their way back.

In a story collection that crisscrosses the country from California to Massachusetts, El Valle is always the center of each story and each character, like any hometown. The difference is that the residents of El Valle often straddle two worlds. Seventh-grader Fernanda, who migrates to El Valle from Mexico with her mother without legal documentation and learns to play baseball with the neighborhood boys, experiences a life-shaking shock on her birthday in "Entradas 2001." In "Roach Meets the Surf," Roach is haunted by her mother’s silence and determined to find out who her father is; she takes off for southern California and learns he was deported years before. In “Alicia Returns a la nada,” a woman goes home to take care of the funeral arrangements for a mother from whom she’d been estranged for years. While all the stories are solidly written, not every one hits equally hard. The shorter pieces are the most interesting, particularly “Tourista,” in which a boy from El Valle going to college in the Northeast gives an impromptu school tour to a Mexican father and son; the congenial interaction turns tense when the student tells the father where in Mexico his own parents are originally from.

With moments of deep pathos and rough power, these stories will ground you in a vivid desert town and its people.