Actress-producer Salma Hayek has reportedly optioned Domingo Martinez’s memoir The Boy Kings of Texas.

The memoir, a National Book Award finalist in the nonfiction category this year, tells Martinez’s coming-of-age story “about the traumas and pleasures of growing up in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980s … Martinez provides a real glimpse into a society where children are traded like commerce, physical altercations routinely solve problems, drugs are rampant, sex is often crude, and people depend on the family witch doctor for advice.”

Hayek’s production company, Ventanarosa, has acquired the rights to The Boy Kings of Texas. She had previously tried to nab the rights and adapt the book into a film, but had been unsuccessful.

The film adaptation is in good hands, as Hayek’s career as a producer has perhaps been as successful as her career as an actress.

Hayek was the executive producer for the ABC series “Ugly Betty”, which was adapted from a Colombian telenovela in 2001. “El Coronel No Tiene Le Escriba” (1999) was the first film she ever produced and went on to be chosen as Mexico’s official submission for Best Foreign Film at the 72nd Academy Awards. The film was adapted from Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s novella of the same name. The film was also entered into the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.