ABOUT
THE BOOK

The Years with Laura Díaz is a portrait of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Laura Díaz, a woman who becomes as much a part of our history as of the Mexican history she observes and helps to create. The action begins in the state of Veracruz and then moves to Mexico City, tracing a migration during the Revolution and its aftermath that is an important element in Laura Díaz’s life as well as in Mexico’s history. This extraordinary young woman, born in 1898, grows into a devoted wife and mother, becomes the lover of great men, and, before her death in 1972, is celebrated as a politically committed artist on whom none of the poignant paradoxes of Mexican life have been lost. Significantly, her life story comes to us thanks to her Chicano great-grandson, inheritor of both her gifts and her paradoxes: the novel opens in Detroit and closes in Los Angeles with him.