From Victor Villase-or, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Rain of Gold , comes the stunning story of a young man's coming of age—a novel that captures the cadences and color, passion and pride of the Mexican-American experience.

Roberto Garcia was only seventeen. But he already had big dreams of freedom, respect, money, familia. With ambition to burn and a passion to prove his manhood, Roberto took the dangerous journey north, crossing the Mexican border to pick fruit in the golden fields of California. There, a good man could make more money in a week than in a whole year in the mountains of Michoacan. Nothing could have prepared Roberto for the jammed boxcars and bolted trucks carrying migrants through burning deserts to fields of dreams. But he was determined to become a norte-o, coming home with a family to save and a score to settle, no longer a boy, but a man.

At once raw and powerful, poetic and heartbreaking, Macho! brings to life the brutality of migrant labor, Cesar Chavez's efforts to unionize the workers, and a vivid portrayal of the immigrant experience as seen through the eyes of a young man who saw it all.