My Brother Andrés
PROLOGUE
IT IS MY EIGHTEENTH birthday, April 17, 1978, late in the afternoon. My brother Andrés and I are on the balcony of his third storey unit in Mazatlán, Mexico, gazing down towards the city spread below us and the Pacific Ocean beyond.
The air is still and the sun is about to sink beneath the western horizon, painting the sky in swathes of scarlet and orange. We can still make out the silhouettes of Wolf, Deer and Bird Islands across the shimmering sea.
We can see the sports stadium and the long stretch of the Malecon seafront promenade from up here. It’s Andrés’s favourite running track, beside the ocean.
Ten years older than me, he’s been testing the latest prosthetic foot for running sent to him by the Ottobock Company in Germany. He is one of a team of athletes selected from around the world to use the latest prosthetics. He is as determined as ever to compete in a Paralympic Games wearing one, even if he has to wait until the year 2000 for the International Olympic Committee to accept prosthetics.
He’ll be fifty years old by then, but we both have Tarahumaran Indian blood in us. We’re among the best long distance runners in the world, matching the East Africans.
That’s why we call ourselves the Rarámurí, the light-footed ones, who run across the ridges and the slopes of the Copper Canyon in the Sierra Madre Mountains.
We spent this morning running along the Malecon, the sea breeze cooling us and the rich salt smell of the sea giving us the energy for an occasional sprint between the lampposts.
I’ve been here now for a week.
I’ve graduated from Saucillo High at last. I’m about to enrol at the Guadalajara University. I decided to study Languages and Applied Linguistics there. It was an easy decision. I already speak four languages: Tarahumaran and Spanish fluently and English and French a little. Besides, I hated Maths and was only moderately interested in Science. I left all that to Andrés, who was good at both. Especially Architecture, which is his day job in Mazatlán.
It’s hard to believe I’ve left school after so many years. Looking back it seems time has flown, whereas before I graduated time seemed to drag on forever.
Andrés grins at me and says, “So, Alicia, this time in August you’ll be a university student.”
“At last. Another four months. It’s taken long enough.”
“It has, and the University will test you. How you face the challenges will tell us who you are. How determined.”
How I face the challenges? I wonder. How determined I am? That’s always been at the heart of my story.
As he speaks, the years fall away. I see myself once again a terrified girl of eight, standing on the bloodstained paving stones of the Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City in October 1968. Deafened by the gunfire and horrified by the bodies falling around me, I will myself to take the last shots in my camera before I run. Then I sprint to safety from the massacre through the labyrinth of the Aztec ruins beside the plaza. It is a self-defining moment when I bravely held my ground.
The memory will never leave me.
While I’m in Mazatlán I intend to write our story as I remember it.
I’ve brought my typewriter and made a start yesterday.
I’ve decided to call it My Brother Andrés.
Enjoy.
Publisher: Dune Publishing (30 January 2025)
Language: English
Paperback: 206 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0975621622
Reading age: 12 – 18 years
Brief Summary – Elevator Pitch:
1968, Mexico City.
The country is going up in flames. Rebellious school and university students are protesting and their demonstrations are threatening the Olympic Games. Alicia Serrano’s older brother, Andrés, is among the students. An outstanding distance runner, he’s been training all his life for the Olympics. Caught up in the unrest, his dreams are shattered when he is shot and seriously injured. Alicia does her best to save his life. They are supported by their father Victor. Sent alone to Mexico from Spain in 1937 when he was twelve years old to avoid the civil war raging there, he never returned. Surviving misfortune is never easy. It takes perseverance.