Francisco, who arrived when she was thirteen, was vulnerable, too-bullied in elementary school, he retreated to studying online. Pedro, born when Yeni was ten, received a diagnosis of autism he was so sensitive to sound that raindrops on the roof could make him spiral, and on the rare occasion when he spoke Yeni understood that he’d given each word serious thought. She had two more sons, and she relied on Yeni to help raise them. Leticia divorced, remarried, and took a second job, at a poultry plant. At the wheel was a neighbor who, for a dollar a day, took care of children whose parents’ workdays started well before class did.

Every morning, Yeni and her little brother Michael rode to a red brick schoolhouse in a car overstuffed with other kids. Yeni’s mother, Leticia, stayed and got a job in the kitchen of a local Mexican restaurant, where the pay was modest but no one was asking about papers. To this day, when the smell drifts fifty miles north, people in Austin call it “the Luling effect.” Yeni’s father worked in oil, too, but it wasn’t long before he was deported. In Luling, Yeni, her parents, aunts, and grandmother settled into a cramped house with a tin roof that was down the street from her great-uncles, the first members of the family to discover the town’s decent jobs, in the oil fields.īlack gold had been gushing there since the nineteen-twenties, and a sulfurous odor hung in the air. At three, she was just old enough to have a sense of a world left behind: the fire that warmed the house in the evening, the meat hung to dry outside the door, and la bisabuela, her adored great-grandmother, who had died shortly before Yeni and her mom went north. Yeniifer Alvarez arrived in central Texas from San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1998.

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