Its April 1969, and fourteen-year-old Yolanda Sahagn can hardly wait to see her favorite brother, Chuy, newly returned from Vietnam. But when he arrives at the Welcome Home party the family has prepared in his honor its clear that the war has changed him. The transformation of Chuy is only one of the challenges that Yolanda and the rest of her family face. This powerful coming-of-age novel, winner of the 1999 Chicano/Latino Literary Contest, is a touching and funny account of a summer that is still remembered as a crossroads in American life. Yolanda and her brothers and sisters learn how to be men and women and how to be Americans as well as Mexican Americans.

A captivating portrayal . . . .the novel is challenging, warm, provocative, often humorous, always engaging.Rudolfo Anaya

Patricia Santanas Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquillity will take you on an exhilarating journey through the tortured landscape of the late 1960s, and show you how the stench of a brutal foreign war and revolutionary winds at home swept into the lives on one Mexican American family in Southern California. . . . Santana takes her place among those new Chicana writers who are refashioning the face of American literature for the twenty-first century.Jorge Mariscal, University of California, San Diego, author of "Aztlan and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War"

Having left her much-loved San Diego barrio, Yolanda Sahagún is now living in the university dorms when a series of events--her mother dies and her father sells their home--forces her to reexamine her life. Yolanda visits her parents' hometown of El Grullo, Mexico, struggling to understand the ghosts in her life--her mother, her father, and her seemingly idyllic childhood. She fears losing herself in the disintegration of the family. For Yolanda, her father is her enemy (or so she thinks), and in the course of the novel we see him at his best and worst, and we see Yolanda at her best and worst. This is a story of Yolanda's initiation into womanhood and about her fierce struggle to make sure her family does not dissolve. Family and sexual politics; love, death, and abandonment; the struggle to resolve a personal identity in the context of a shattered, first-generation immigrant American family--these are the hugely painful obstructions Yolanda must surmount or incorporate into her own being as she makes her life's journey. Ghosts of El Grullo is a sequel to Santana's critically acclaimed and prize-winning Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility.