Clean new name for the novel:

Pura Neta

Simply

Pura Neta

And if you don’t know, then ask somebody!

🙂

Pura Neta is Street Spanglish for Pure Truth.

Humbled by all the love and support, the blurbs that are coming in from literary heavy hitters, with more to come. This book is for you, la gente, loved ones. It has always been my privilege to serve you.

Publication release date: September 2020, Pochino Press.

PRAISE FOR PURA NETA:

Pura Neta is uniquely Benjamin Bac Sierra. His experiences in the Bay Area’s barrio streets, in the Gulf War, and as a highly-educated activist for justice in our communities intertwine with a poet’s pen, a storyteller’s heart, and the barrio’s unflinching eyes. You will want to read this more than once to revel in the heavily mined depths laden with secrets and treasures.

—Luis J. Rodriguez, award winning author,  Always Running, La Vida Loca

 

Ben Bac Sierra’s Pura Neta breathes the living and the dead mixing it up on the barrio streets, with authentic dialogue, sharply drawn characters, and an effortless combination of poetry and prose, compelling you to keep reading.

The real deal of La Mision, tough love in every sentence. Ben transports us to a place only he can describe, where: “Every day is the apocalypse.”

–Alejandro Murguía, San Francico Poet Lauréate Eméritas

 

Pura Neta is poetry. It is a chorus singing out its history. A poignant elegy for comrades and a city consumed by gentrification, racism, police brutality. An invigorating cry of revolution. Benjamin Bac Sierra, the Bard of the Mission, bears witness to a changing San Francisco and affirms that real power lies with people “creating concoctions of craziness and putting it all into action”!

–Shawna Yang Ryan, American Book Award Winner, Author of Water Ghosts

 

SUMMARY OF PURA NETA:

Set in the San Francisco Mission varrio from 2012 to 2014, Pura Neta (Pure Truth) explores the creative struggle of Homeboys and Homegirls fighting against gentrification, police brutality, racism, and economic and educational injustice. Cartoon, a Homeboy who had been banished from the varrio twenty years earlier, has returned from his educational and spiritual odyssey. He finds the hood under attack, and it is no longer the gangs, but the monsters of cafes, cheese schools, and micro-breweries, protected by their own police force, that are destroying the native San Franciscans. In order to strategize a meaningful movement, Cartoon visits his old mentor, El Lobo, a varrio shot caller who is now serving a life prison sentence in San Quentin. Cartoon then recruits the young homies, Lil Santo and Alex Neta, who begin implementing La Movida into amor action in the hood, until the police kill Alex Neta, which ultimately sparks The Revolt of Los Locos.