Author Grace Flores-Hughes’ memoir ‘A Tale of Survival: Memoir of a Hispanic Woman’ receives honorary mention at the New England Book Festival.

Grace Flores-Hughes was born and raised in a hot little town in Texas that carried the name of the 27th president of the United States: Taft. The town sets the scenario for her first book, A Tale of Survival: Memoir of a Hispanic Woman, which was recently awarded an honorary mention by The New England Book Festival.

A regular contributor to VOXXI, Grace says A Tale of Survival is the final product of many hesitations.

“What do I want to say,” doubted Grace. “I wrote and rewrote and many times wanted to give up. Then I thought, if Jane Austen rewrote [one of her books] six times, why not me?”

But she was not exactly fraught by words. Grace knew what it could mean to draw family skeletons out of the closet.

“I wanted to write for years,” she said in exclusive interview with VOXXI. “I lived in one of the most segregated towns in America. It was divided by the railroad. We never played with Anglo children. Except for school, we never had contact with them. It was a unique experience. People don’t know that discrimination wasn’t limited to the black community, they don’t know what the Hispanics have gone through.”

In A Tale of Survival, besides revealing dark family secrets, she reminisces those times in which “los bolillos” shouted “wetback” at her, and Anglos wouldn’t allow her to play in her favorite park. Times when Buelito recreated the children with stories about the Mexican revolution and at bedtime Amagrande narrated… well, not precisely fairy tales.