Brown Son of Lorca: A Boy Reclaimed in Poems, Stories & Voice

What happens when a boy is taught to trade his mother tongue for survival?

In this powerful and poetic collection, award-winning writer and performer Rodolfo Valier Alvarado confronts the silence that shaped his youth in Lubbock, Texas. Surrounded by the castoff relics of other people's lives in his mother's secondhand store, a young boy discovers a book by Federico García Lorca-hidden in a box, written in a language he was told to forget. That moment sets in motion a lifelong journey of identity, loss, and reclamation.

Brown Son of Lorca is a deeply personal tapestry of poems, short stories, and a performance piece meant to be spoken aloud. With grace, fury, and unflinching honesty, Alvarado explores what it means to be brown in a world that rewards erasure. He gives voice to the silenced, pays tribute to cultural memory, and reaches across time to embrace the boy he was told to leave behind.

For readers drawn to themes of language, Latino identity, intergenerational silence, and artistic defiance, this book offers not just beauty-but belonging.

If you've ever dreamed in two languages, questioned where you came from, or fought to reclaim your voice, Brown Son of Lorca is for you.