ALL THAT RISES
In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.
What follows is a story in which mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways—all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities—as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce—never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.
All That Rises is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong—within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.
Praise
“I first met Alma García at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. I knew her work would be important, and now All That Rises proves it. Alma brings it and gives it all. Enhorabuena, novelista. An auspicious debut.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Good Night, Irene
“Expansive and well grounded, All That Rises shines as a novel willing to trace its fingers into the highest and darkest branches of the family tree. García gives us an astounding panoply of characters—funny, wounded, smart, and proud—all of them striving to understand how families can nurture the strength of their roots only through hard-won honesty. An immersive and compassionate first novel.” —Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences
“Beautiful, outrageous, and beguiling.” —Helena María Viramontes, author of Their Dogs Came with Them
“All That Rises introduces us to a refreshing new voice in Latinx literature. With empathy and grace, Alma García has mapped the borderlands in a bold new way. The result is a novel of stark originality populated by characters whose lives readers won’t easily forget.” —Alex Espinoza, author of Still Water Saints
“A remarkable work of fiction. Alma García has skillfully woven an engaging story of a modern American family redolent with the themes of the border, the Rio Grande remaining an Archimedian point in every character’s life and choices from living in El Paso. García truly understands how the imprint of a life lived in two cultures at once can never leave you. A wonderful accomplishment.” —Domingo Martinez, author of The Boy Kings of Texas
“With All That Rises, Alma García makes a significant contribution to the rich and beautiful literature that comes out of the border. Not only do we care deeply about her people, but the landscape itself becomes a well-developed, complex character in this compelling, vivid, and often funny novel about family, economic class, and the borders we share, both literal and metaphorical.” —Daniel Chacón, author of Kafka in a Skirt
“(García’s) characterizations are virtuostic in their display of psychological insight—just as at home in the minds of border agents, maids, and housewives. Tracing the fault lines that divide families and neighborhoods, the book sheds light on the way secrecy is passed down through generations. The prose is confident, filled with evocative images and poetic parallels… and the often heady story assumes a fierce pace, resulting in an intricate, organic, and moving book.” —Willem Marx, Foreword Reviews
EXCERPTS
From Chapter 1: Shallow Waters
The morning Jordan was born, Huck had taken the long way home from the hospital on the frontage road beside the river and pulled over. He’d been light-headed as he shuffled from his vehicle to the chain-link fence, uncertain of what he was looking for. A wide, dusty incline of creosote-pimpled rock rose up at his back to where the railroad tracks lay. Above that, the freeway rumbling with early traffic and the university looming at mountainside, its red roofs like square hats. Before him, the river was free of the concrete bed that bound it for much of the length of the city, and it was running muddy and low. He released an unsteady breath. Eight years out on the open highway of parenthood, only to find himself now back on the doorstep of that soul-fracturing, gutted sleep; the mountains of diapers and snot wipers; the long, long tantrum-filled march toward kindergarten, already itemized with expenses and delays for the next eighteen to twenty-five years.
His new child had smelled of blood as she squalled in his arms, and had felt like a very ripe peach.
It was then that he noticed a man in the distance. A boy, actually. He stood almost opposite Huck on the Mexican side, at river’s edge—no barbwire on his side, of course—pitching stones into the murk. Behind him, a low, graffiti-slicked cinder block wall held back the familiar clumped shacks, which seemed to be trying but not quite managing to arrange themselves in straight lines. Huck watched the boy leaning, his arm slicing the air again and again, the explosive splash of each rock. He watched until the boy lowered his arm and looked up. The boy raised his hand to wave. Huck raised his hand in return, a swift current of optimism rising within him before the sun flashed against a tin roof and everything was lost in the glare.
From Chapter 2: The Brown Invasion
Jerry cracks opens Sons of Oñate. He whaps it shut. He descends through a rising aroma of Pine-Sol into the kitchen, where he comes upon the maid herself, a dowdy vision in rubber gloves and seventies-era headphones, from which are emanating the sounds of a soccer game at tremendous volume.
She stands at the sink with her back to him, filling a bucket with hot water. Welcome back, booms the announcer, to the midseason game of the Primera División, and it’s shaping up to be the biggest game yet of 2005! Chivas have the ball!
He watches coolly as she moves the bucket to the floor and scrubs the sink. Foul on Bautista! Monarcas get the penalty kick! Chivas take possession at midfield. Medina passes to Ávila. Ávila to Agüayo—but no, Chivas recapture and Vermeulen, the Belgian, takes the ball, he’s closing in, he shoots—
“Sí, sí, sí,” she chants at the ceiling.
“GOOOLLLLLLLpe de poste!”
She hisses through her teeth. “¡Me lleva!”
“Buenas tardes,” he calls out. She startles and whirls around to face him. “Ay, perdón.” She shuts off her headphones and removes them, blushing. “Buenas tardes, señor.”
He forces a smile. “¿Usted se llama Lourdes, no?”
Her dark complexion mottles as she nods at the window over the sink. Does she think he’s making fun of her by speaking to her as an equal? He has no idea. He removes a casserole dish of macaroni and cheese from the refrigerator and inserts it into the microwave, then snatches up the remote from the kitchen island. The TV squawks to life in the den. The news is nattering on again about the fence. Every bit of disconnected chain link and barbwire along the border converted into a seven-hundred-mile wall of concrete and steel. Brownsville to San Diego. In theory.
Also, the war in Iraq. Some new mid-occupation iteration of the United States invading somebody, bombing somebody, installing somebody, evading somebody.
He zaps the TV off.
Remind me of how often will we be seeing you, Lourdes?
Twice a month, señor.
The microwave beeps. She mops. Well, he says. He locates a Diet Coke and fills a glass with ice. Have . . . fun.
