Victor Villaseñor's epic chronicles four generations of his own family, following his maternal and paternal lines from Mexico's mountain villages through the chaos of the Mexican Revolution, across the border into California, and into the bootlegging economy of Prohibition-era America. On the maternal side is Lupe, a girl from a remote gold-mining town in the Sierra Madre whose family is driven into exile and starvation by the war. On the paternal side is Juan, a child laborer in the Arizona copper mines whose family scrapes together survival through farm work and homemade liquor. Their eventual meeting and marriage forms the book's emotional core. Villaseñor spent more than a decade interviewing relatives, traveling through Mexico, and collecting the oral history that produced this book; he originally pitched it as nonfiction and famously bought back the rights from a major publisher who wanted it sold as fiction. The result reads with the sweep of a novel but is built from documented memory. Rain of Gold has become a landmark of Mexican-American literature, taught in schools across the Southwest, valued for its frank treatment of poverty and racism and for its unembarrassed depiction of spiritual experience and miracle-stories at the heart of Latino family life.