Author: Fernando Piñón

About the Book: 

A hurricane brings two people together as they seek shelter in the old Spanish town of Old Ciudad Guerrero, which lies party inundated along the banks of Falcon Lake in the border between Mexico and Texas – one is a frustrated failed middle-aged businessman and the other is a teenage boy seeking to enter the country illegally so he can get a job to support his family and ailing grandfather. They both are searching to transcend their reality, and the means to do it lies in the contents of a briefcase the boy finds in a pickup truck washed away by the storm.

In pursuing their new realities, they both get caught in the web of the drug trade and the laundering of money, that have tainted the U.S.-Mexico border communities, creating an environment of greed and corruption that have brought violence and devastation to the Mexican border communities while bringing prosperity to the American side of the border.

This is a story of how hope, trust, and the power of love can be entities of transcendence, just as greed and selfishness can be agents of destruction.

About the Author: 

Fernando Piñón is a retired professor of political science at San Antonio College and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Before teaching, he was a journalist, having been the first Mexican American editor of a Texas daily newspaper -- The Laredo Morning Times from 1971 to 1974. He also was a political columnist for the San Antonio Express News in the 1980s and early 1990s. For many years, he was owner and publisher of El Visitante Dominical, a national Catholic newspaper.

As a journalist, he won several first place editorial and feature writing awards from the Texas Associated Press Association. 

Mr. Piñón holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in political science from the University of North Texas, and finished one year of law school at Notre Dame University.

As a journalism student, he was a member of the Sigma Delta Chi, the honorary journalism fraternity; was editor of The Campus Chat, the university student newspaper; and won a first place column-writing award in university competition.

In 1972, he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention held in Miami Beach, Florida, as a George McGovern delegate.

Throughout his career, Mr. Piñón has published numerous books and academic articles about Mexican American politics published in academic journals and college textbooks. Among the academic articles are:  “Leadership and Mexican American Politics:  a Study of Laredo and San Antonio,” unpublished master’s thesis; “La Raza Unida in Texas: an Attitudinal Study,” published in the Southwest Journal of Social Science in 1973; “Latino Politics in Texas,” published in “Texas Politics Today,” by Maxwell and Crain.

His books include:  “Of Myths and Realities:  La Raza Unida Party in Texas,” Vantage Press, New York, 1976; “Patrón Democracy,” Ediciones Contraste, Mexico City, 1980; “Child of the Half Millennium,” Plaza Valdez, Mexico City, 2001; and “Dynamics of U. S. Government: Culture, Ideology, Politics and Law,” Kendall-Hunt, Dubuque, Iowa, 2009; and “Searching for America in the Streets of Laredo:  The Mexican American Experience in the Anglo American Narrative,” Centro de Estudios Sociales Gramsci, Mexico City.

Transcendence is his first novel.

Piñón is married to Libna Arana, a Chilean citizen who was exiled under dictator Augusto Pinochet, and who is now a U.S. citizen. He has three children: Adriana, a graduate of Harvard and Columbia University Law School; Fernando, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin; and Veronica, a graduate of Marymont University and the University of London.