The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez

I read this memoir because it was on a list of books that one should consider reading if you wanted to know more about Mexican-American immigration and the border experience instead of American Dirt.
This memoir has been described as gritty and that makes it sound cleaner than it ended up reading to me.  It chronicles the struggles of a Latino boy who is inexplicably tied to the rough border town of Brownsville of his birth.  It is a scary, poor place where fathers and sons team up to smuggle pot into the United States, curanderas are consulted about border crossings, and a kid who  dared to go out with some drug thug's girl invariably ends up dead.  He captures what it is about leaving your family behind, how hard that is to accomplish, no matter how toxic they are for you.  It is a rough read.  The information divulged — about extreme poverty and misplaced machismo in a land where higher education is actually discouraged — can be as unbelievable as it feels unbearable.