Victor Villaseñor

So begins the passionate, touching memoir of Victor Villaseñor. Highly gifted and imaginative as a child, Villaseñor coped with an untreated learning disability (he was finally diagnosed, at the age of forty-four, with extreme dyslexia) and the frustration of growing up Latino in an English-only American school in the 1940s. Despite teachers who beat him because he could not speak English, Villaseñor clung to his dream of one day becoming a writer. He is now considered one of the premier writers of our time.

MACHO details seventeen-year-old Roberto Garcia’s journey from the state of Michoacán, Mexico, to his illegal entry into the United States. His backbreaking work in the vegetable fields of California and the workers’ divided sentiments over César Chavez’s efforts to unionize the workers are chronicled in a style that many critics have compared to John Steinbeck. MACHO is a novel of the conflict of spiritual, social and economic values during the coming of age of a young Mexican.