The Consequences is set in the Mexican-American community of California's Central Valley, depicting the lives of farmworkers and their children who contend with limited opportunities, queerness and the challenges of intimacy. Manuel's ongoing project has been to write about people like those he grew up with who don't otherwise turn up in American fiction or get considered as part of the history and mythology of California, although he's not out to merely represent Mexican and Mexican-American lives, but rather to allow them their complications and contradictions.