Growing up in a Spanish American culture in the American West at the turn of the twentieth century invites assimilation, a process made all the more conflicted through the evolving stages of individuation and the tensions of political correctness and hyphenated identities: Anglo-American, Spanish-American, Mexican-American, Native American, and the subcultures of Stompers, Pachucos, Chicanos, Cholos, Indios, and Squares. This book contains a dozen interconnected stories set against these laminated ethnicities. Whether read as love songs or laments these soul stories all serenade the American Southwest and its allure as a landscape of adventure and romance during the transition from Old to New West. It is said that a land determines a people and is determined by them, a belief told lyrically and poignantly in these story serenades. Includes Readers Guide.

Robert Franklin Gish is the author of numerous works of fiction, memoir, biography, and essay. He teaches writing at the University of New Mexico where he is a distinguished alumnus and is an emeritus scholar and professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa and former Director of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University. Gish is a member of the Authors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and Western Writers of America. He is also an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.