Las Hijas de Juan

""Las hijas de Juan" is a searching and searingly honest portrayal of struggle, survival, and "corage"! This is a woman's story that has lessons for the entire community."--Louis Gerard Mendoza, author of "Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana and Chicano History"

Josie Méndez-Negrete is Professor of Mexican American Studies in the Division of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

"I found myself confounded into silence by the magnitude of the author's pain and by the confessional frankness in her tone as she writes about the traumas inflicted upon her and her sisters... the author possesses great courage and resilience... Telling this story must have taken awesome strength... I can imagine that survivors of abuse might find her calmness encouraging: it suggests healing is possible even in the worst cases. I believe that Mendez-Negrete has made a positive contribution to the feminist literature on trauma and incest." Bookslut "To tell this story took an inordinate amount of courage, to have survived it makes me marvel at the power of the human spirit. As a reader, one feels deeply grateful for the privilege of being granted into its confidence. Josie Mendez-Negrete writes that the healing is not in the telling, but perhaps it resides in us, the listeners. May this story, then, travel far." Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street "This book is the genuine song of the survivor, and the narrator's personal story is also a political reality of the Chicano/a and Latino/a community, an ugly beast fed on silence that must be both contained and confronted."--Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Latino Studies "[Las hijas de Juan] is the childhood story of courage and resistance to patriarchy too frightening to be imagined and too hurtful to be forgotten."--Norma L. Cardenas, Journal of Latinos and Education