House Built on Ashes - (Chicana and Chicano Visions of the Américas) by Jose Antonio Rodriguez (Paperback)

About the Book

Poignant and lyrical, House Built on Ashes contemplates the promises, limitations, and contradictions of the American Dream. Even as it tells a deeply personal story, it evokes larger political, cultural, and social realities. It speaks to what America is and what it is not. It speaks to a world of hunger, prejudice, and far too many boundaries.

Book Synopsis

The year is 2009, and José Antonio Rodríguez, a doctoral student at Binghamton University in upstate New York, is packing his suitcase, getting ready to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with his parents in South Texas. He soon learns from his father that a drug cartel has overtaken the Mexican border village where he was born. Now, because of the violence there, he won't be able to visit his early-childhood home. Instead, his memories will have to take him back.

Thus, Rodríguez begins a meditative journey into the past. Through a series of vignettes, he mines the details of a childhood and adolescence fraught with deprivation but offset by moments of tenderness and beauty. Suddenly he is four years old again, and his mother is feeding him raw sugarcane for the first time. With the sweetness still on his tongue, he runs to a field, where he falls asleep under a glowing pink sky.

The conditions of rural poverty prove too much for his family to bear, and Rodríguez moves with his mother and three of his nine siblings across the border to McAllen, Texas. Now a resident of the "other side," Rodríguez experiences the luxury of indoor toilets and gazes at television commercials promising more food than he has ever seen. But there is no easy passage into this brighter future.

Poignant and lyrical, House Built on Ashes contemplates the promises, limitations, and contradictions of the American Dream. Even as it tells a deeply personal story, it evokes larger political, cultural, and social realities. It speaks to what America is and what it is not. It speaks to a world of hunger, prejudice, and far too many boundaries. But it speaks, as well, to the redemptive power of beauty and its life-sustaining gift of hope.

Review Quotes

"House Built on Ashes is labeled a memoir, but could just as easily be considered a collection of creative nonfiction shorts. Rodriguez writes beautifully, and his prose conveys the transition from his early
childhood in rural Mexico to his life on the "other side" once he moves across the Texas border. The short-story structure works well, reflecting the way individual anecdotes combine to form memory. . .told in a way that makes the seemingly simple feel truly meaningful."--Foreword Reviews

"Rodriguez writes beautifully, and his prose conveys the transition from his early childhood in rural Mexico to his life on the "other side" once he moves across the Texas border. The short-story structure works well, reflecting the way individual anecdotes combine to form memory. . .told in a way that makes the seemingly simple feel truly meaningful."--Foreword Reviews


"In House Built on Ashes, José Antonio Rodríguez has gifted us a luminous coming-of-age memoir, a tender, searching exploration of what it means to be a resident alien in more ways than one. Rodríguez is an intimate guide to the hoops of allegiance that a boy-becoming-man must leap."--Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor and Dreambirds: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune

"José Antonio Rodríguez has written a classic. Gently poetic, utterly authentic, packed with rich scenes, House Built on Ashes invites us into the author's worlds of growing up in a big family in the borderlands of Mexico and South Texas. Read this brilliant book by a true maestro--hold his many worlds with reverence and curiosity--you will never be the same."--Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer and You and Yours

"A beautiful portrayal of a world seldom seen in American letters, House Built on Ashes is needed, especially now."--Sandra Cisneros, author of A House of My Own: Stories from My Life and The House on Mango Street