Award-winning Cuban-born author Raul Ramos y Sanchez explores the immigration debate through fiction anew with his latest novel, House Divided. The publisher, Grand Central, provides this synopsis of Ramos’ second book:
Once they had a country, a culture, and a future. Today, upheaval and betrayal have turned their world upside down. And for one family – a U.S. war hero, his deeply religious wife, and their impressionable fourteen-year-old son – a new struggle has begun. Manolo “Mano” Suarez made a choice to fight against injustice, and his wife can only pray for his deliverance. Now their son, Pedro, takes up his father’s cause – lured in by an extremist group, disappearing into the ranks of their cult-like organization and leaving his family far behind. To rescue him, Mano must face the consequences of his past. But how can he convince his son to give up the very ideals he, himself embraced? How can he prove that home and family are the most important ideals of all?
House Divided picks up where America Libre, Ramos’s first and equally provocative oeuvre, left off. Just as he did in America Libre, Ramos infuses House Divided with an unwavering voice – one well informed by the fear that the immigration reform smack downs in this country have engendered. Ramos has, among other pursuits, developed Two Americas: The Legacy of our Hemisphere, a documentary for public television. He also hosts MyImmigrationStory.com, an online forum for this country’s immigrant community.
While extremists have targeted him and his work, audiences, overall, have embraced his fiction. Most recently, America Libre won first place in the inaugural Books Into Movies Awards sponsored by Latino Literacy Now, an organization founded by renowned actor Edward James Olmos. Additionally, viewers of the December 7 episode of ABC’s No Ordinary Family might have caught America Libre prominently displayed on set. It appears that both Latinos and the mainstream have embraced a novel that Publishers Weekly had called “a sweeping, intense novel of extremism, fear and consequences.”
With House Divided, Ramos continues to shape the immigration narrative, while simultaneously holding it down for other authors who are part of fiction’s Latino Renaissance.
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