Inez comes home from school to find FBI agents ransacking the house and her father under arrest for smuggling marijuana. In the devastating aftermath, the old ways cherished by her beloved Mexican grandmother offer refuge. But life in El Paso is far more exciting, as miniskirts, rock music, and the sexual revolution shatter tradition on both sides of the border.Poised between two countries and between childhood and adulthood, her fractured family no longer providing safe ground, Inez must choose whether to make the dangerous leap her parents never quite made, the leap faced by every new American: letting go of the old country to embrace a new destiny in the United States.American Tumbleweeds captures poignantly the growing pains of a young girl and of all immigrants whose dual cultural identities lend them both strength and strife. From Amalia, the matriarchal grandmother, to Inez, woman-child of the 1960s, these "American tumbleweeds" portray every family: loving and clinging, wounding each other deeply while comforting each other in the soul-deep ways that only families can reach. Says Sonia Manzano, "Maria" of Sesame Street: "This is an experience all Americans should know about."