The Other Barrio: New and Selected Stories

In the title story, a once-elegant hotel—now a rundown apartment building for mostly single men and a few desperate families—burns to the ground, killing seven people. City building inspector Roberto Morales had recently reviewed it and knows there was nothing wrong with the wiring, even before he’s hustled off to a “meeting” with a local mafioso. As he pounds the pavement of San Francisco’s grimy Mission District, looking for clues to the fire, he realizes the lengths to which developers will go to make another million—even as far as sending seven innocent souls to “the other barrio.”

San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus Alejandro Murguía imbues his mostly brown, working-class characters with the grit necessary to face every day in this collection of short fiction. Several characters eke out a living in La Mission. Others struggle in Latin American countries like Mexico and Nicaragua, where war and revolution have altered the trajectories of people’s lives—including María José, who returns to her native village after fleeing the violence of civil war. Though she has dreamed countless times of revenge, when she comes face to face with the man who held her down as she was raped by soldiers, all she can do is forgive him. “She wanted to bury the pain, erase it, start all over—the right way.”

These stories—many previously published in anthologies, journals and newspapers and now gathered into one volume—feature Latinos of the United States and depict universal themes like relationships between men and women, the privileged versus the disadvantaged and overcoming the hardships of the past.