Having left her much-loved San Diego barrio, Yolanda Sahagún is now living in the university dorms when a series of events—her mother dies and her father sells their home—forces her to re-examine her life. Yolanda visits her parents' hometown of El Grullo, Mexico, struggling to understand the ghosts in her life—her mother, her father, and her seemingly idyllic childhood. She fears losing herself in the disintegration of the family. For Yolanda, her father is her enemy (or so she thinks), and in the course of the novel we see him at his best and worst, and we see Yolanda at her best and worst.

This is a story of Yolanda's initiation into womanhood and about her fierce struggle to make sure her family does not dissolve. Family and sexual politics; love, death, and abandonment; the struggle to resolve a personal identity in the context of a shattered, first-generation immigrant American family—these are the hugely painful obstructions Yolanda must surmount or incorporate into her own being as she makes her life's journey.

Ghosts of El Grullo is a sequel to Santana's critically acclaimed and prize-winning Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility.