Overview

ANTONIO, WE KNOW YOU follows the life of a migrant farmworker kidnapped at age four, trafficked through age ten at a famous California Ranch, until being saved from an attempted suicide and taken under Cesar Chavez's wing. Antonio eventually graduated from law school and found the strength and resilience to be reunited with his long-lost family after 24 years. In telling his story, Antonio aims to offer hope in desperate circumstances. He shares the legacy of his family and reflects the dignity and sacrifices of their difficult Chicano life.

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9781954332256

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A man recounts his rise from a victim of abuse to an activist and lawyer in this debut memoir ... for all the violence and predation, the author's story is a comprehensive one, encompassing the issues of exploitation, assimilation, and perseverance found at the heart of the wider Chicano experience ... inspirational. - KIRKUS REVIEWS San Antonio, prayed to for lost things, is a good patron saint for one who was stolen from his family and lost his childhood to cruelty and abuse. The telling of that loss and how it was overcome to grow into a healer of injustice is in itself an act of courage and of healing in a world governed by cruelty that puts at stake the very Earth itself by a failure of the heart and of the mind. - Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, Poet Laureate, Berkeley, California This memoir reveals the potential vigor and strength and unending capacity for hope. - Jimmy Santiago Baca, Award-winning Poet, Essayist and Novelist I celebrate the incredible strength it took to reveal the truths of a painful life and share the deepest parts of his soul and his life. It is a profoundly hopeful memoir and shines light in the darkness. - Rabbi Sydney Mintz, Congregation Emanu-El

A man recounts his rise from a victim of abuse to an activist and lawyer in this debut memoir.Salazar-Hobson was never supposed to be an attorney. Born the 11th of 14 children to a Mexican American family in Arizona, Antonio Salazar y Bailon was in the fields from a young age. His family lived in public housing and worked as crop pickers, rising early in the morning to labor in the cool hours before midday. He and his siblings would find respite from their drunken, abusive father at the home of their kindly White neighbors, the Hobsons. Even after the childless Hobsons moved out of the projects, they invited the author over to their new home ... When his parents finally caught on, the Hobsons kidnapped and adopted him, raising him as Tony S. Hobson until he was 16 years old. The abuse continued. It was only in high school that Salazar-Hobson was able to break away from their influence, rediscover his roots through his Chicano farmworking neighbors, get involved in the labor movement, and meet the man who would forever shape his life: Cesar Chavez. The author's prose is simple and direct, describing his emotional journey in inspirational language ... Salazar-Hobson's account of abuse reads like something from a horror novel. It's so disturbing and unusual that the more familiar topics of activism, education, love, and family-all covered in the book's second half-feel somehow incongruous with what has come before. But for all the violence and predation, the author's story is a comprehensive one, encompassing the issues of exploitation, assimilation, and perseverance found at the heart of the wider Chicano experience. -KIRKUS REVIEWS

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