Butterfly BoyButterfly Boy
Heartbreaking, poetic, and intensely personal, Butterfly Boy is a unique coming out and coming-of-age story of a first-generation Chicano who trades one life for another, only to discover that history and memory are not exchangeable or forgettable.
Growing up among poor migrant Mexican farmworkers, Rigoberto Gonz#65533;lez also faces the pressure of coming-of-age as a gay man in a culture that prizes machismo. Losing his mother when he is twelve, Gonz#65533;lez must then confront his father's abandonment and an abiding sense of cultural estrangement, both from his adopted home in the United States and from a Mexican birthright. His only sense of connection gets forged in a violent relationship with an older man. By finding his calling as a writer, and by revisiting the relationship with his father during a trip to Mexico, Gonz#65533;lez finally claims his identity at the intersection of race, class, and sexuality. The result is a leap of faith that every reader who ever felt like an outsider will immediately recognize.
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- Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, c2006.
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