He Walked In and Sat Down and Other Stories

The stories in this bilingual collection portray the everyday lives of a cross-section of Chicano men and women in the contemporary U.S. Here are workers living in the chaparral around the San Diego border with Mexico, battered wives, farmworkers, divorced women rebuilding their lives, a traveling salesman, and conflicted academics. In direct and hard-edged prose, the author gives voice to the disenfranchised and alienated. The narrative perspective changes from story to story, portraying the experiences of what could become classic characters in Chicana fiction.

"Sánchez brilliantly and sensitively portrays the hard life of undocumented Mexican men and women working in the United States. She is a masterful storyteller able to weave suspense from the first to the last sentence. Written with the style reminiscent of Tomas Rivera and Juan Rulfo, each narrative conveys a message difficult to forget."--María Herrera Sobek, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Sánchez is a storyteller, interweaving voices at once unheard or unspoken. The characters in these stories range from the disenfranchised to Chicano/a academics, but all struggle to have their stories told."--Helena Viramontes