Nepantla Familias

Nepantla Familias brings together Mexican American narratives that explore and negotiate the many permutations of living in between different worlds: how the authors or their characters create or fail to create, a cohesive identity amid the contradictions in their lives. Nepantla or living in the inbetween space of the borderland is the focus of this anthology. The essays, poems, and short stories explore the in-between moments in Mexican American life: the family dynamics of living between traditional and contemporary worlds, between Spanish and English, between cultures with traditional and shifting identities. In times of change, family values are either adapted or discarded in the quest for self-discovery, part of the process of selecting and composing elements of a changing identity. Nepantla is the quintessential American experience that revives important foundational values through immigrants and the children of immigrants. Here readers will find a glimpse of contemporary Mexican American experience; here, also, readers will experience complexities of the geographic, linguistic, and cultural borders common to us all--