In this part of the novel, you get a real taste of what some of us call “internalized racism.” This is when a non-white person starts to believe, on a subconscious level, what the racist world says of him: in young, sixteen-year-old’s Tony case, he’s seen as a mongrel, the mix of a white man and a Salvadoran woman, someone who is despised in Appalachian Tennessee.
His mother sends him away from their racist small town to attend a private school in nearby Knoxville (which, to Tony, coming from the mountains, looks like a metropolis, which, by the way, it’s not). He lives with families. And in one of those families, horrible, horrible things happen.
Enjoy!
You can find “The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones” at Amazon.
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