House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea

I read about this book in The Week, which is not where I get most of my book recommendations, but some of them, and it was right on this time.
This is in your face about pride and Mexican culture.  The elegance that men carry with them each day as well as the machismo.  The role of food in the eyes of those who live there.  The border itself between Mexico and the United States and all that that says about those on either side of it.  The good, the bad, and the ugly--that classic combination that drives the best of fiction--are all on display here.
This noisy, messy, jockeying for position of a family in this novel revolves around the dying patriarch Miguel Angel “Big Angel” de la Cruz.  Three generations gather over the course of a weekend for a final celebration. His mother recently dead, Big Angel himself is on the way out after an outsize life of danger, romance and striving. There are flashbacks to harder times and choices made, and there it the present, where they all are and why.  Orbiting him is a proliferating solar system of children and relatives, and with them a galaxy of feuds, slights, alliances, resentments, flirtations and memories.  It is a flipping of the finger at those who think that Mexico is mono dimensional.  There are rapists and murderers, just like here, but the breadth and beauty that is Mexico is like a hymn being sung.