Traditional Mexican retablos, (devotional folk paintings) offer a complete story in one small frame. In these literary retablos, a young Mexican American boy comes of age during the 1960s/'70s in El Paso, Texas, living in a house just a mile's distance from the Rio Grande, with an identity as both "citizen" and "other." At the grinding edge of the tectonic plates that are Mexico and the USA, among the stress, dislocation and upheaval affecting those who live there, he experiences his first kiss, first betrayal, first defiance of an abusive father, his guilty conscience and confusion, forgiveness and liberation, the rites of passage and rituals of childhood that will shape him into a man.