Synopsis: Child of Sonora begins with the juxtaposition of the lives of two 7-year-old boys in the Sonora Desert. The first boy lives in Scottsdale in 2017, and the second boy lives in the Tohono O’odham Territory in 1848. The history begins during the Mexican-American War, and takes the reader through Indian boarding schools, diseases (i.e., smallpox, cholera, diabetes) and the exploitation of Indian labor, all the result of European occupation. Although each story illustrates the proverbial human pronouncement -- that there is joy, sorrow, and difficulty in life no matter the year or the landscape – the stories converge and provide a parallax view of Native Americans’ endemic struggle with the US immigration process, both historically and today. Scottsdale: After 7-year-old Colby loses his mother to a sudden cardiac arrest, Mel is not only his sole parent, but is also his hero, confidant, and best buddy. Together they regularly get absorbed in evening baseball on TV, which both distracts them from their grief and tightens their father-son bond. However, Mel is also dousing his aching grief with alcohol, and unknown to Mel, his precocious child is hurting deeply because of it. Mel owns a small landscaping company and owes his success, in part, to the reliable hard work of his crew of three. One afternoon Alfonso “Poncho” Marquez, his foreman, receives a deportation notice after his arrest for felony possession of a hash pipe, and this sets into motion a legal defense based on suspicion that the pipe was planted, but more important is the constitutional argument that Poncho’s rights as a DACA recipient are not equal to other legal residents. That’s when Mel and Colby get involved in helping Poncho fight the dubious pipe discovery -- and the injustice of the legal system. Tohono O’odham: After the 7-year-old Tohono O’odham boy loses both his parents to a massacre of his village by renegades from the US Volunteer Army in 1848, he is picked up by regular Army soldiers and taken to a Mission in the Gila Valley where he is made to learn the white man’s ways. This tragic usurpation of his tribal ways leads to his life-long mission to not only redeem his ancient customs but also to pass them to future generations, and each of these succeeding generations has its own struggles with acceptance and injustice as 175 years of discrimination reaches all the way to the present day. Best regards, Joseph VanZutphen vandlay@msn.com (360) 606-1303