But at night, we huddled together even closer when we heard a horse pass by our window the sound of its hooves sending chills up our spines. Mago told us not to believe anything Abuela Evila said. So you three better behave, or the devil is going to take you away."
"He's looking for all the naughty children to take back to Hell with him. "That's the devil making his rounds," Abuela Evila said the next morning when we told her what Mago had seen. "Right, Reyna?" I nodded, but none of us could fall back to sleep. "We don’t believe you," Carlos said again. "I'm not, I swear I'm not," Mago insisted. "But he was dragging something behind him in a sack!" The clop-clopping of the hooves grew fainter and fainter. "It was a man, a man on a horse," Mago whispered. As the memoir ends on a hopeful note, Reyna expresses the resilient faith she has in her family-and all families like hers-to rise above their past and carve out a better future for themselves and one another. Reyna ultimately goes on to graduate college, becoming the first member of her family to do so. As she grows older, Reyna finds outlets for self-expression through music and creative writing, and, with the help of her community college mentor Diana Savas, at last discovers her voice and potential as an author. As Reyna and her siblings Mago and Carlos navigate their adolescence, they struggle to heal the wounds of their past-wounds left by their parents’ abandonment, their grandmother’s cruelty, and the trauma of their dangerous childhoods-while making a future for themselves in the face of continued adversity. In Los Angeles, however, the grass is not necessarily greener Reyna has escaped the rural poverty of her youth and the miserable household of her father’s mother, but now finds herself in close quarters with a father whose alcoholism, violence, and need for control have made him into a veritable stranger. When her father Natalio returns and offers to take her and her siblings back to America with him to live in “El Otro Lado”-on “the other side”-Reyna believes that all her dreams of happiness and comfort are about to come true. After her parents both travel illegally to the United States for work, leaving Reyna and her siblings in the care of their cruel Abuela Evila, Reyna is subject to indignity upon indignity and a seemingly endless spiral of abuse and neglect. Reyna, the author and protagonist of the book, is a sensitive, imaginative, and introspective child whose harsh upbringing in poor and rural Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico forms a foundation of poverty, abuse, and abandonment that she spends her entire adolescence trying to rise above.
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