The Chicano characters in Richard Yanez's debut story collection live in El Paso's Lower Valley but inhabit a number of borders-between two countries, two languages, and two cultures, between childhood and manhood, life and death. The teenaged narrator of Desert Vista copes with a new school and a first love while negotiating the boundaries between his family's tenuous middle-class status and the working-class community in which they have come to live. Tony Amoroza, the protagonist of Amoroza Tires, wrestles with the overwhelming grief from his wife's death until an unexpected legacy prompts...