Cholos and Surfers: A Latino Family Album

Jack Lopez has crafted a series of essays that speak more to the human condition than to the latino condition. For anyone who has grown up in America, let alone southern California, this is a collection that speaks volumes. There is an emotional tug in each piece that requires the reader to stop, go back a few sentences and then read again. At times funny, sad, and hopeless, this is a major work.

In these remarkable personal essays Lopez is son, brother, father, husband and friend; the human condition (and within it the "Latino condition") is inseparable from family and friends, for without them we have nothing. For Lopez, as one critic has pointed out, surfing is a powerful metaphor for staying alive and being true to yourself in a society where identities are so easily washed away. Lopez's quiet compassion, insight and honesty manage to make more meaningful thunder than many of the trendier, louder essayists writing about the American scene today; and anyone who likes the work of Mary Helen Ponce, Ilan Stavans and Richard Rodriguez (or for that matter Joan Didion and Truman Capote) should try this book, and, if they like it, to make the effort to track down Lopez's fiction, which has appeared in these excellent Latino short story anthologies: MIRRORS BENEATH THE EARTH, PIECES OF THE HEART, IGUANA DREAMS, MUY MACHO and CURRENTS FROM THE DANCING RIVE! R, among others.