Showing results by narrator "Victoria Villarreal" in All Categories

Ever since Precious Perez was a child, she has loved music. Her family always praised her singing, saying she could even attend Berklee College of Music one day—planting a seed that would become her dream. Precious was born two and a half months prematurely and weighed just one pound. Her eyes did not fully develop, and she is blind. With an engaging, accessible voice, Precious delivers an empowering first-person account of her determination to achieve her dreams, even with the world stacking the odds against her.

Lola de La Peña yearns to be free from the societal expectations of a young Mexican lady of her station. She spends her days pretending to be delicate and proper while watching her mamá cure the sick and injured with sal negra (black salt), a recently discovered magic that heals even the most mortal of sicknesses and wounds. But by night, she is Salvación, the free-spirit lady vigilante protecting the town of Coloma from those who threaten its peace and safety among the rising tension in Alta California after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Last year, Maggie and Nora didn’t exactly get the summer of their dreams. Instead, they had to survive a camp run by a covert clan of vampires. But this year, Camp Sylvania is back and under new management—gentle, hippie-dippie Luna Lupowski. So the girls are convinced to give camp another try.

Emilia and Gregorio spent their childhood following their grandmother through the mountains of central México, gathering the ingredients she used for curandera work and learning about the supernatural world. When she passes away, the siblings are left alone. So they scrape together their money and pay coyotes to smuggle them to their father in the United States. The siblings are exhausted before they even reach the border, where the coyotes seize Emilia for their own harsh ends.

Arranging ofrendas. Brewing pericon into a healing tea. Releasing traumas through baños and limpias. Herbalist and curandera Atava Garcia Swiecicki spent decades gathering this traditional knowledge of curanderismo, Mexican folk healing, which had been marginalized as Chicanx and Latinx Americans assimilated to US culture. She teaches how to follow the path of the curandera, as she herself learned from apprenticing with Mexican curanderas, studying herbal texts, and listening to her ancestors.

Some kids have one job: to be a kid! Cecilia has two. When she isn't on the soccer field scoring goals, she's accompanying her parents to all kinds of grown-up places, like the DMV, the accountant's office, and the auto shop. She helps them translate from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. It’s an important job, and it can even be fun. It’s also hard work. Sometimes Cecilia's second job is so much responsibility, it feels like she'll split in two! Is it time for Cecilia to blow her whistle and call for a time-out?

Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo are hardworking, undocumented employees at the Detmer Foods chicken plant in Springdale, Arkansas, just a stone’s throw from the trailer park where they’ve lived together for seven years. While dealing with personal tragedies of their own, the young couple endures the brutal, dehumanizing conditions at the plant in exchange for barebones pay.