The Flower in the Skull by Kathleen Alcalá

Ethnic Resonances: New Perspectives on Performance, Literature, and Identity will be the first edited volume to interweave ethnic studies and literature with ramifications of resonance. The concept of “resonance” functions at the interstices of the humanities and science, referring to the two-way, ever broadening effects of movement or action, a concept significant for such disciplines as music, sociology, linguistics, physics, and medicine. Kalogeras Georgios (School of English Language and Literature, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), Waegner Cathy C. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.Ethnic Resonances in Performance, Literature, and Identity Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. This might fill a gap between more substantial efforts, but can't hold interest on its own.

A thin stretch of a story, with scattered lyric beauty. publisher, jumps at the chance to escape her stalking, harassing boss by going on a research trip to Tucson, where she finds not only a mystery involving her mother's family and her people in a broader sense, but also the will to survive the horror waiting for her when she returns to Los Angeles. Two generations forward, Shelly, an editorial assistant for an L.A. Busy starting her own family and keeping her own house, Rosa still wonders about her mother's past-and the father she never knew. Over the years, Rosa picks up the burden when her mother grows too weak to continue the dawn-to-dusk housecleaning work that has sustained them, but then Rosa catches the eye of a young minister and receives Concha's blessing to marry him just before Concha dies. A brief marriage fails to produce more children, so her husband dallies with someone else, leaving Concha and daughter Rosa to fend for themselves. But when she's raped by an Anglo and has his child, nothing can ever be the same. First abandoning home with her family, then herself abandoned by her mother, Concha walks in a daze across the desert to Tucson, where she's taken in as a nanny by a prospering Mexican family. Childhood comforts in her Opata village in Sonoran Mexico cease for Concha when her father is seized by Mexican soldiers and never seen again. Alcal's overly ambitious latest, the second part of a planned trilogy that began with Spirits of the Ordinary (1997), spans more than a century in offering a view of three women linked by Indian blood and their dreams, and seared by the violent transgressions of men.

The Flower in the Skull by Kathleen Alcalá