As a creative writing colleague of Sandra’s over the last ten years, I have witnessed her power of storytelling. When Sandra tells you a story, listeners cry, and when she tells a happy story, listeners rejoice and laugh with her. Most of us have never had the raw life experiences she describes, such as bedding down in an open field for your bedroom; wearing the same clothes day in and day out because that’s your entire wardrobe; or being shoeless or wearing ill-fitting shoes too big or too small for your growing feet. Most of us have never had the heartbreak of finding your father left for dead in an open ditch along the side of a muddy dirt road in the middle of the night. I am left speechless just trying to articulate the life-threatening experiences Sandra describes so well. Sandra shares the strength and power of familial love, inculcated by her father and mother among their offspring from sacred birth onward. This love is the thread that stitches her family together, shielding them from the harsh realities of life that they face in the migrant worker communities of Texas and California. -Tom Kirkpatrick, author of The Love that Endures: Remembering my Mother and my Father, U.S.S. Arizona’s Chaplain at Pearl Harbor.

I had the pleasure of listening to and reading the chapters and other writings that make up this book in a writing class we both attended. Sandra is a good stroyteller, sharp and to the point, often offering a grand O’Henry last line. I deeply appreciate her memoir as an example of clear writing that chisels a sharp picture of. her life, worth reading and re-reading! —Bob Neumann, author of Peace Warriors and There’s Gotta be a Way.

This timely memoir of one family’s migration, from Mexico to Texas to the Salinas Valley in California, searching for a better life for their children, offers tales full of humanity, emphasizing the interconnection between us all. —Christine Galea