My New Book is Available!

My new book, "Songs From the Barrio" is now available at https://www.createspace.com/3902152.  It is the culmination and distillation of an idea that festered in me for many years. I started writing when I was a young soldier in Germany in 1963. I had no idea then where it would take me. But I knew I wanted to write!

And here it is at last! Here I am at 74 and publishing my first book, proving that you are never to old to realize your dreams! But it is well that it all worked out the way it did, but I almost missed the boat; I have finally aquired all the the tools to do it with: experience, writing skill, a good memory, and the inherited gift of story-telling passed to me by my ancestors.

The stories in my book tell of a people, a time and place of which only remnants remain. They began as a series of disjointed stories I wrote about my childhood, growing up in a Mexican barrio in Central California in the middle of 20th Century, stories and poems of escapades and the amazing people I grew up around, Mexican immigrants who had so much to teach, to give. After reading my stories to audiences for years, and hearing them react: laugh, cry and applaud in approval, I began to toy with the idea of putting them all into a book.

Above all, it is a story about the beauty of culture, language and tradition. Much of the book tells of my mother, who married at 15 and emigrated to the US with my dad in the early 1920s and her detemination to single-handedly raise a family of 7. It is a story of triumph, my own and of a people estranged from their language and culture, finding their rightful place in an alien world.

If you read and enjoy it, share it with friends and family, and take a precious moment to share comments on this blog. If you read and enjoy it, take a moment to post a short "review" by clicking on my book at Amazon.com.

It is NOW available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and Kindle. Teachers: please look at it for a possible reader in your class. I believe the reading level to be 7-college. I can be contacted at rrios39@sbcglobal.net. I have a discount code for orders of 20 or more copies.