The Palm Doesn't Know It Needs You

Thermal, California, 1995. Eight-year-old Rudy Treviño folds 312 grape boxes in a hundred and ten degrees. When a white car comes down the dirt road, he learns to lie in English to protect his parents.

His father climbs date palms forty feet into the sky, the only place, he says, where nobody asks him for papers. His mother sells tamales on Sixth Street and slips a folded dollar into a coffee can every Sunday. On the can, in Rudy's best printing, is one word: BERKELEY.

Between the grape fields and that word stands every wall the valley can build. A counselor who says students like Rudy are more comfortable somewhere else. A sheriff's Polaroid at the canal. A checkpoint on Grapefruit Boulevard. A missed deadline that could cost him everything. Then his father falls from a palm, and the whole family has to decide what they are willing to carry.

The Palm Doesn't Know It Needs You is the story of a Chicano family in the Coachella Valley who refuse to let the earth swallow them. It's about a trailer park that sweeps your yard when you can't, a neighbor who sells raspados out of her kitchen window, a teacher with a shelf of books by people who look like you, and a young woman from Salinas who knows where the envelopes are kept. It is heartbreaking and it is hopeful, and it never pretends the road is fair.

Most of all, it's about a promise a son makes in the dark in Row 9: to climb the palm his father fell from,and put him in with the pollen.

If you were the first in your family to go, or if you ever held the ladder for someone who was, this book was written for you. Nobody climbs alone. Somebody has to go up. It might as well be you.