SYSTEM · ACTIVE
FRANCISCO CASTILLO // 6 VOLUMES
Home / Books / Mijo: We Bend, Not Break
VOL. 02 · Literary Fiction

Mijo: We Bend, Not Break

★ Winner · 2025 International Impact Book Award

A novel about fathers, sons, and the silence between them.

Some families pass down land. Others pass down silence. For three generations, the men of the Martínez family have learned that strength means endurance, not expression. Holding their stories tight, their pride tighter, and their pain in the deepest places they don't name. From the cracked soil of Michoacán to the fields of Central California, this is how they survive.

Alejandro grows up believing this is the only way to be a man, until the pressure inside him finally ruptures into the one thing his family fears most: the truth. Father and son collide. Old wounds surface from the places no one talks about. And the Martínez men are forced to face a question they've avoided for decades. How do you break a cycle that raised you?

Mijo is for anyone who grew up being the strong one, anyone shaped by generational expectations, anyone trying to become something more than what they inherited. A story about the courage it takes to bend, so you don't break.

CategoryFiction · Novel
Pages272
ISBN978-1-7376612-1-8
Published2025
Buy on Amazon → Also available: Kindle · Paperback
Keep Reading
Essay
Mexican American men and the emotional inheritance nobody names
10 min read
Vol. 05 · Book
The Language That Raised Us
Cultural memoir · 240 pp
Next · Vol. 03
Embracing the S.U.C.K.
For men · 256 pp