"Beloved patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday bash. As the party approaches, his nearly one-hundred-year-old mother dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with his identity as part gringo and with the differences between his siblings' lives and his own. Across two bittersweet but riotous days in their San Diego neighborhood, four generations celebrate Big Angel and his mother, recounting the many myths that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought the de La Cruzes to this fraught and sublime country they have come to call home"--Back cover.