Showing results by narrator "Johnny Rey Diaz" in All Categories

Rain of Gold is a true-life saga of love, family and destiny that pulses with bold vitality, sweeping from the war-ravaged Mexican mountains of Pancho Villa's revolution to the days of Prohibition in California. 

In this rare account from within ICE detention facilities, 14 children are followed from their arrest by US Border Patrol to the day they exit facilities for unaccompanied minors. The author, a therapist within a major children's detention facility, offers a vivid, and often surprising, firsthand description of daily life within our immigration shelters; the complicated, often heroic efforts of shelter workers; and the processes and politics that decide if a child is deported or allowed to join family.  

In the 1950s, tensions remain high in the border town of La Frontera. Penny loafers and sneakers clash with boots and huaraches. Bowling shirts and leather jackets compete with guayaberas. Convertibles fend with motorcycles. Yet amidst the discord, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist’s daughter. But as they’ll soon find out, their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they could have known.

A provocative, inspiring, and highly original take on the education and healing of troubled, alienated and gang involved youth. These are beautiful, harrowing stories of transformation as both a high-crime urban and a reservation Indian community decide to throw out convention and rethink what it means, and what it takes, to raise their most alienated and difficult children.

An orphaned boy with long hair to cover scars and a bewitched glass eye is raised by a collective of mariachis in East Los Angeles. Since childhood, Jimmy Ojotriste (sad eye) has busked the teeming Mexican restaurants of the Eastside with violinist Ray Chin and green-eyed tenor Victor Salcedo. At 20, all three boys are in love, stuck, and one of them is dying. What follows is a lyrical quest through the Latin music underground of Los Angeles that will eventually take them from Tijuana to Andalusia. 

In this rare account from within ICE detention facilities, 14 children are followed from their arrest by US Border Patrol to the day they exit facilities for unaccompanied minors. Preschoolers and teenagers, the kids offer a range of evocative backstories: A deaf and mute 15-year-old Mayan girl; a teen from India who has walked 3000 miles; a Guatemalan girl who has escaped domestic slavery and is on the run with her young siblings. Each child offers an account of their chaotic journey and the situation that drove them to enter the US illegally.

Two intertwining stories of Bogotá. One, a family of five children, left to live on their own. The other, a girl in an orphanage who will do anything to befriend the mysterious Immortal Boy. How they weave together will never leave you.