Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.

In Silver Springs, Arizona, her mother's stories of the monstrous La Llorona are thrilling but unbelievable to science-loving Paola until she and her best friends Dante and Emma take a walk through a cactus field near the Gila River.

"Thirteen-year-old Paola Santiago must return to the void to rescue her best friend Dante and face her biggest foe yet: El Cucuy, the lord of nightmares"--

As they prepare to make the traditional "chile ristras," strings of red peppers, Christina's grandmother tells her the story of how magical chile seeds given to her great grandfather, a farmer in the hills of New Mexico, ensured the continuation of the chile pepper.

After eleven-year-old Zitlally's father is deported to Mexico, she takes refuge in her trailer park's forest of rusted car parts, where she befriends a spunky neighbor and finds a stray dog that she nurses back to health and believes she must keep safe so that her father will return.

Told in the style of a cumulative folk song, a grandmother makes empanadas, a traditional Hispanic treat, for her family. Includes recipe.

A young girl wishes her family could be more like her friends' families and subconsiously blames her abuela and her yellow handkerchief, but she slowly grows to appreciate and love the language and culture the handkerchief represents.

A young girl enjoys her family's weekly trip to Fourth Street, where she and her cousins eat mangos and tacos, look at clothes and shoes, watch all the people on the busy street, and take care of such chores as haircuts and grocery shopping.

"Seventh grader Estefania "Stef" Soto is itching to shake off the onion-and-cilantro embrace of Tia Perla, her family's taco truck. She wants nothing more than for her dad to get a normal job and for Tia Perla to be put out to pasture. It's no fun being known as the "Taco Queen" at school. But just when it looks like Stef is going to get exactly what she wants, and her family's livelihood is threatened, she will have to become the truck's unlikely...

With great gusto, a child's grandmother performs deep knee bends, consumes a breakfast of "huevos estrellados," and practices vocal exercises before going to work as a storyteller.