Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante & Literary Curator for the Latino Bookstore at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (GCAC) in San Antonio Texas, welcomes award-winning Seattle writer, teacher, and editor Alma García as she returns to her El Paso roots with her debut novel, ALL THAT RISES (University of Arizona Press, 2023), a story of secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering what it means to belong—within a family, as well as in the world beyond, ahead of her Texas Author Series appearance on November 10th, 2023 at the Guadalupe's Latino Bookstore.
Join us for NP Live on October 9th, 2023 at 7:30 PM CDT via our Nuestra Palabra's multi-stream platform broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube!
Alma García is a writer whose award-winning short fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and most recently in phoebe and the anthology Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. She is a past recipient of a fellowship from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Originally from El Paso and later from Albuquerque, she now lives in Seattle, where she teaches fiction writing at the Hugo House and is a manuscript consultant.
In her debut novel, ALL THAT RISES, two guardedly neighboring families in El Paso, Texas, have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales’ home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.
What follows is a story in which mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways—all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities—as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce—never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.
ALL THAT RISES is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong—within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.
Tony Diaz
Writer and activist Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante, is a Cultural Accelerator. He was the first Chicano to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. In 1998, he founded Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say (NP), Houston’s first reading series for Latino authors. The group galvanized Houston’s Community Cultural Capital to become a movement for civil rights, education, and representation. When Arizona officials banned Mexican American Studies, Diaz and four veteran members of NP organized the 2012 Librotraficante Caravan to smuggle books from the banned curriculum back into Arizona. He is the author of The Aztec Love God. His book, The Tip of the Pyramid: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital, is the first in his series on Community Organizing. Tony hosts Latino Politics and News and the Nuestra Palabra Radio Show on 90.1 FM, KPFT, Houston’s Community Station. He is also a political analyst on “What’s Your Point?” on Fox 26 Houston.
Nuestra Palabra is funded in part by the BIPOC Arts Network Fund.
Instrumental Music produced / courtesy of Bayden Records baydenrecords.beatstars.com