Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.
Audiobooks by Arturo Hernandez-Sametier
Browse audiobooks by Arturo Hernandez-Sametier, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
The Good Lessons
'A necessary read for anyone serious about personal transformation and peace in our communities.' Luis Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, and author of 'Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.'
A provocative, inspiring, and highly original take on the education and healing of troubled, alienated and gang involved youth. These are beautiful, harrowing stories of transformation as both a high-crime urban and a reservation Indian community decide to throw out convention and rethink what it means, and what it takes, to raise their most alienated and difficult children.
Raised in East Los Angeles and also a professional musician, Hernandez-Sametier has been a teacher, counselor and principal in some of the most difficult urban and rural school environments across the U.S. and Indian Country. He recently served as a therapist for high-trauma, unaccompanied minors detained by U.S. immigration. In 2006, he was honored as the 'national educator of the year' by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education.
In this rare account from within ICE detention facilities, fourteen children are followed from their arrest by U.S. Border Patrol to the day they exit facilities for unaccompanied minors. Preschoolers and teenagers, the kids offer a range of evocative backstories: a deaf and mute fifteen-year-old Mayan girl; a teen from India who has walked three thousand miles; a Guatemalan girl who has escaped domestic slavery and is on the run with her young siblings. Each child offers an account of their chaotic journey from Guatemala, India, Honduras or Mexico, and the situation that drove them to enter the U.S. illegally. We get an intimate view of their long, difficult quest for release to U.S. relatives and a rare, first-hand view of daily life within U.S detention shelters.
The author, a therapist within a major children's detention facility, offers a vivid, and often surprising, first-hand description of daily life within our immigration shelters; the complicated, often heroic efforts of shelter workers; and the processes and politics that decide if a child is deported or allowed to join family. In the epilogue, the author explains that due to Homeland Security restrictions, sharing information about the internal workings of migrant shelters forfeits any future employment. The author believes this to be the principal reason there are no other published accounts from within facilities for unaccompanied minors.
A lush, nostalgic barrio romance reminiscent of Marquez and Allende. An orphaned boy with long hair to cover scars and a bewitched glass eye is raised by a collective of mariachis in East Los Angeles. Since childhood, Jimmy Ojotriste (sad eye) has busked the teeming Mexican restaurants of the Eastside with violinist Ray Chin and green-eyed tenor Victor Salcedo. At twenty, all three boys are in love, stuck, and one of them is dying. What follows is a lyrical quest through the Latin music underground of Los Angeles that will eventually take them from Tijuana to Andalusia. Steeped in the music of mariachi and flamenco, and the “brujeria”, sensuality, and street life of disco era Los Angeles, Jimmy Ojotriste is an intense, musical romp through a vanishing world in the company of characters you will miss dearly when it’s over.
“Gave me the feeling of reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the first time.” Amazon Review
“Romantic in the biggest sense of the word.” Goodreads Review
“Lovely novel about young mariachis finding their place in the world, soaked in a vibrant sense of place and time. Somehow captures that feeling of being twenty and seeing the world spread before you in a way I've rarely seen portrayed well.” Goodreads Review
“Wrapped in the sights and sounds of 1970s Los Angeles, vibrant and nostalgic, Hernandez explores the complex intersections of race, love, poverty and coming of age…and through it all we are serenaded by his lyrical descriptions of the life and music of the mariachi.” Tate Hurvitz, Phd. Grossmont College Literature Dept.
“…Definitely for music lovers and romantics. Lyrical scenes - odd and memorable characters. Anyone interested in flamenco, mariachi, and Hispanic culture will be immersed. I learned of the book through 'Las Comadres' a Latino lit reading group at our bookstore.” Goodreads Review
