Presentations & Workshops

In Person and Virtual

American Librarian Association Convention, San Francisco

Calipatria State Prison

Harvard University

Holy Names Catholic University

Los Angeles Office of Education

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago

North Island Naval Base

Rocky Mountain Upward Bound Resilience Symposium

San Jose State University

Santa Barbara Unified School District

Texas A&M University, Kingsville

Texas Association for Bilingual Education

Universidad de Benito Juarez, Oaxaca, MX

University of Alabama at Birmingham

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.

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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.

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His memories of events from 50 years ago are passionately vivid, and at times they seem to leap off the page, striking with such an impact that you wonder how one person could face such abuse of the heart and soul and still emerge with his dignity intact.

He verbosely chronicles his sexual awakening and shares with the reader the pleasures his body, and those of the opposite sex, bring him. If that weren’t enough, his blasphemous conversations with himself about his Catholic faith may prove shocking to some, while others will recoil when they discover what he hides in between the pages of his Bible.

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In his critically acclaimed bestseller Rain of Gold, Victor Villaseñor brought his mother's family vividly to life. In Wild Steps Of Heaven, he turns to his father's family, the Villaseñors. Against a vivid backdrop of love and war, magic and heroism, the author breathes life into his father's people--and in particular, the Villaseñor women*Margarita, the indomitable matriarch who was swept away by Don Juan Jesus Villaseñor on the eve of the Mexican revolution*their beautiful daughters, who find strength and endurance in their mother's faith, and searing passion amidst the turmoil of war. But it is little Juan, the youngest son, through whose eyes this tumultuous saga unfolds. Juan would learn from his brother Jose, a hero of the revolution, how to be a man; and from his beloved mother, how to live and love con gusto y amor.

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A daring memoir of love, magic, adventure, and miracles, Victor Villaseñor's Thirteen Senses continues the exhilarating family saga that began in the widely acclaimed bestseller Rain of Gold, delivering a stunning story of passion, family, and the forgotten mystical senses that stir within us all.

Thirteen Senses begins with the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the aging former bootlegger Salvador and his elegant wife, Lupe. When asked by a young priest to repeat the sacred ceremonial phrase "to honor and obey," Lupe surprises herself and says. "No, I will not say 'obey'. How dare you! You don't talk to me like this after fifty years of marriage and I now knowing what I know!" After the hilarious shock of Lupe's rejection of the ceremony, the Villaseñor family is forced to examine the love that Lupe and Salvador have shared for so many years -- a universal, gut-honest love that will eventually energize and inspire the couple into old age.

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