Capirotada is a book about Nogales written by Alberto Rios.  Capirotada is also a Mexican bread pudding.  Read the book and you will learn about food and the border and immigrants.

Here is my review on Amazon:

Capirotada is a special book.  Its simplicity moved me and the small stories that it told helped me feel how Nogales was in the 1950’s and 60’s.  I usually find memoirs to be too orderly for literature and to self-serving for nonfiction. This one is different.  Rios’s memoir is beautiful literature.

Alberto Rios writes in the same way that a great abstract painter paints.  He draws an outline and leaves blank spaces.  He admits that he doesn’t know things.  The pieces that he puts in are enough so that you can accept the unknowns and the uncertainties of his life or yours and just see enough of the picture so you can feel how it was without knowing everything.

Capirotada is brilliantly written book that is a marvelous tribute to his parents, to Nogales, and to immigrants everywhere.

I bough the book many years ago and found it the other day while looking for another book with a map of Tijuana.  I was going to send it to Maria Sedgewick since she lives and works in Nogales but I read a few pages and was captivated.  I ended up with four connections to the book.  Rios’s mother came to the US from England on the same Cunard ship that I came on.  I was about six years behind her.  Rios teaches at ASU where the Changing Boundaries Map exhibit is currently and he has, according to his web site an interest in maps.  And finally there is our shared connection to Nogales.