Brooding with Storm Clouds:

After twenty-six years, award-winning photographer Lena Mendel returns to Oaxaca, Mexico, where at the age of sixteen she spent a transformational school year with six other girls. Now she’s back with Marta and Carmen, classmates from that magical time. With them is Lena’s adolescent son Gabriel, bent on establishing his independence from his mother’s single parenthood.

As the travelers savor the giant puppets, daring fireworks and romantic serenades of Oaxaca’s streets, an unexpected encounter unearths a long-buried secret that exposes the shadowy politics of this dazzling city, challenges Lena’s own autonomy, and changes the lives of mother and son forever. Then Gabriel seeks to remain in Oaxaca.

Within the crucible of Oaxaca’s massive 2006 teachers’ strike and the brutal repression of those organizing for their rights, Lena and Gabe realize a new relation to themselves, each other, and to this troubled land.