The Real Woman Behind Keroauc's 'Mexican Girl'

The Real Woman Behind Keroauc's 'Mexican Girl'
FILE - Author Jack Kerouac laughs during a 1967 visit to the home of a friend in Lowell, Mass. The city of Lowell is set to hold an expanded version its annual festival celebrating the city's most famous writer _ Jack Kerouac. The four-day event, sponsored by Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! and UMass Lowell, begins Thursday and will feature tours of places Kerouac frequented and featured in his writing. Kerouac died in 1969.(AP Photo/Stanley Twardowicz, File)
FILE - Author Jack Kerouac laughs during a 1967 visit to the home of a friend in Lowell, Mass. The city of Lowell is set to hold an expanded version its annual festival celebrating the city's most famous writer _ Jack Kerouac. The four-day event, sponsored by Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! and UMass Lowell, begins Thursday and will feature tours of places Kerouac frequented and featured in his writing. Kerouac died in 1969.(AP Photo/Stanley Twardowicz, File)

Poet, novelist, and performance artist Tim Z. Hernandez is receiving critical acclaim for Mañana Means Heaven, a novel based on the life of Bea Franco, the "Mexican Girl" in the American Beatnik generation classic, "On the Road." The iconic writer Jack Kerouac has a chapter about the time he spent in a relationship with a Chicana farm worker, who was fleeing an abusive husband and who had left her two children behind. Kerouac called her Terry, the Mexican girl, but it was Bea Franco.

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