Pierce Library invites you to join us in celebrating Latino/a/x Heritage Month!
Each year, the United States of America observes "National Hispanic Heritage Month" from September 15 to October 15, by celebrating the histories, cultures, and contributions of American citizens and noncitizens from--or with ancestors from--Mexico, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Central and South America. The observation started in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week under President Lyndon Johnson and was expanded by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 to cover a 30-day period starting on September 15th and ending on October 15th. The day of September 15 is significant because it is the anniversary of independence for Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on September 16 and September 18, respectively.
Latino (or Latina) is defined as "a person of Latin American descent residing in the United States." This is not to be confused with Latin Americans, which refers to the people actually living in Latin America presently. Federal policy defines “Hispanic” not as a race, but as an ethnicity; it prescribes that Hispanics can, in fact, be of any race. The term "hispanic" was adopted by the U.S. government in the 1970s to give people from Latin America a common identity. However, "hispanic" refers to Spanish-speaking countries, and therefore excludes a big part of the region—namely Brazil, which is Portuguese-speaking. The emerging terms of "latinx" or latine are recommended as a gender-neutral approach to include trans, queer, and other non-binary identities.
Below, you will find books and other resources that celebrate and explore various Latino/a/x cultures and histories.
Chicanx Utopias: Pop Culture and the Politics of the Possible by
Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post-World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences. In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.
Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America by
A sweeping history of the Latinx experience in the United States. The first new edition in ten years of this important study of Latinos in U.S. history, Harvest of Empire spans five centuries--from the European colonization of the Americas to the 2020 election. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States, and their impact on American culture and politics is greater than ever. With family portraits of real-life immigrant Latino pioneers, as well as accounts of the events and conditions that compelled them to leave their homelands, Gonzalez highlights the complexity of a segment of the American population that is often discussed but frequently misrepresented. This landmark history is required reading for anyone wishing to understand the history and legacy of this influential and diverse group.
Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism by
Who are Latinos and where do they fit in America’s racial order? In this “timely and important examination of Latinx identity” (Ms.), Laura E. Gómez, a leading critical race scholar, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity, she argues, has been the ferocity of anti-Latino racism. In what Booklist calls “an incisive study of history, complex interrogation of racial construction, and sophisticated legal argument,” Gómez “packs a knockout punch” (Publishers Weekly), illuminating for readers the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making processes that Latinos have undergone over time, indelibly changing the way race functions in this country. Building on the “insightful and well-researched” (Kirkus Reviews) material of the original, the paperback features a new afterword in which the author analyzes results of the 2020 Census, providing brilliant, timely insight about how Latinos have come to self-identify.
Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces by
Within a trans-embodied framework, this anthology identifies transmovimientos as the creative force or social mechanism through which queer, trans, and gender nonconforming Latinx communities navigate their location and calibrate their consciousness. This anthology unveils a critical perspective with the emphasis on queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of immigrants and social dissidents who reflect on and write about diaspora and migratory movements while navigating geographical and embodied spaces across gendered and racialized contexts, all crucial elements of the trans-movements taking place in the United States. This collection forms a nuanced conversation between scholarship and social activism that speaks in concrete ways about diasporic and migratory LGBTQ communities who suffer from immoral immigration policies and political discourses that produce untenable living situations. The focal point of analysis throughout Transmovimientos examines migratory movements and anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, and stigma toward people who are transgender, immigrants, and refugees. These deliberate consciousness-based expressions are designed to realign awareness about the body in transit and the diasporic experience of relocating and emerging into new possibilities.
Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities by
In Abstract Barrios Johana Londoño examines how Latinized urban landscapes are made palatable for white Americans. Such Latinized urban landscapes, she observes, especially appear when whites feel threatened by concentrations of Latinx populations, commonly known as barrios. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis of barrio built environments, Londoño shows how over the past seventy years urban planners, architects, designers, policy makers, business owners, and other brokers took abstracted elements from barrio design--such as spatial layouts or bright colors--to safely "Latinize" cities and manage a long-standing urban crisis of Latinx belonging. The built environments that resulted ranged from idealized notions of authentic Puerto Rican culture in the interior design of New York City's public housing in the 1950s, which sought to diminish concerns over Puerto Rican settlement, to the Fiesta Marketplace in downtown Santa Ana, California, built to counteract white flight in the 1980s. Ultimately, Londoño demonstrates that abstracted barrio culture and aesthetics sustain the economic and cultural viability of normalized, white, and middle-class urban spaces.
Nepantla Squared: Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift by
2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist Nepantla Squared maps the lives of two transgender mestiz@s, one during the turn of the twentieth century and one during the turn of the twenty-first century, to chart the ways race, gender, sex, ethnicity, and capital function differently in different times. To address the erasure of transgender mestiz@ realities from history, Linda Heidenreich employs an intersectional analysis that critiques monopoly and global capitalism. Heidenreich builds on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of nepantleras, those who could live between and embody more than one culture, to coin the term nepantla², marking times of capitalist transition where gender was also in motion. Transgender mestiz@s, too, embodied that movement. Heidenreich insists on a careful examination of the multiple in-between spaces that construct lives between cultures and genders during in-between times of shifting empire and capital. In so doing, they offer an important discussion of race, class, nation, and citizenship centered on transgender bodies of color that challenges readers to rethink the way they understand the gendered social and economic challenges of today.
We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States by
The widely recognized "Dreamer narrative" celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of "deserving" immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers--themselves currently or formerly undocumented--poignantly counter the Dreamer narrative by grappling with the nuances of undocumented life in this country. Theorizing those excluded from the Dreamer category--academically struggling students, transgender activists, and queer undocumented parents--the contributors call for an expansive articulation of immigrant rights and justice that recognizes the full humanity of undocumented immigrants while granting full and unconditional rights. Illuminating how various institutions reproduce and benefit from exclusionary narratives, this volume articulates the dangers of the Dreamer narrative and envisions a different way forward.
Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America by
Latin American athletes have achieved iconic status in global popular culture, but what do we know about the communities of women in sport? Futbolera is the first monograph on women's sports in Latin America. Because sports evoke such passion, they are fertile ground for understanding the formation of social classes, national and racial identities, sexuality, and gender roles. Futbolera tells the stories of women athletes and fans as they navigated the pressures and possibilities within organized sports. Futbolera charts the rise of physical education programs for girls, often driven by ideas of eugenics and proper motherhood, that laid the groundwork for women's sports clubs, which began to thrive beyond the confines of school systems. Futbolera examines how women challenged both their exclusion from national pastimes and their lack of access to leisure, bodily integrity, and public space. This vibrant history also examines women's sports through comparative case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and others. Special attention is given to women's sports during military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s as well as the feminist and democratic movements that followed. The book culminates by exploring recent shifts in mindset toward women's football and dynamic social movements of players across Latin America.
Constituting Central American-Americans: Transnational Identities and the Politics of Dislocation by
Central Americans are the third largest and fastest growing Latino population in the United States. And yet, despite their demographic presence, there has been little scholarship focused on this group. Constituting Central American-Americans is an exploration of the historical and disciplinary conditions that have structured U.S. Central American identity and of the ways in which this identity challenges how we frame current discussions of Latina/o, American ethnic, and diasporic identities. By focusing on the formation of Central American identity in the U.S., Maritza E. Cárdenas challenges us to think about Central America and its diaspora in relation to other U.S. ethno-racial identities.
Citizens but Not Americans: Race and Belonging Among Latino Millennials by
An exploration of how race shapes Latino millennials’ notions of national belonging Latino millennials constitute the second largest segment of the millennial population. By sheer numbers they will inevitably have a significant social, economic, and political impact on U.S. society. Beyond basic demographics, however, not much is known about how they make sense of themselves as Americans. In Citizens but Not Americans, Nilda Flores-González examines how Latino millennials understand race, experience race, and develop notions of belonging. Based on nearly one hundred interviews, Flores-González argues that though these young Latina/os are U.S. citizens by birth, they do not feel they are part of the “American project,” and are forever at the margins looking in. The book provides an inside look at how characteristics such as ancestry, skin color, social class, gender, language and culture converge and shape these youths’ feelings of belonging as they navigate everyday racialization. The voices of Latino millennials reveal their understanding of racialization along three dimensions—as an ethno-race, as a racial middle and as ‘real’ Americans. Using familiar tropes, these youths contest the othering that negates their Americanness while constructing notions of belonging that allow them to locate themselves as authentic members of the American national community. Challenging current thinking about race and national belonging, Citizens but Not Americans significantly contributes to our understanding of the Latino millennial generation and makes a powerful argument about the nature of race and belonging in the U.S.
The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles by
A collection of essays, interviews, and scholarship exploring the often overlooked history of Latin American musicians and music in the shaping of Los Angeles. Featuring a mix of academics, musicians, and journalists, the book listens to the vibrant Latin American soundtracks of Los Angeles, from Hollywood film sets to recording studios, from vaudeville theaters to Sunset Strip nightclubs, and from Carmen Miranda to Perez Prado and Juan Garcia Esquivel
The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir by
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother's fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called "the secrets": the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit "the secrets," Rojas Contreras' mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water. This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to "the secrets." In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono's remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir by
Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the '90s, Erika L. Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment--a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy and dreamed of an unlikely life as a poet. Twenty-five years later, she's now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she's still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her. In these essays about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression to the redemptive pursuits of spirituality, art, and travel, Sánchez reveals an interior life that is rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception--that of a woman who charted a path entirely of her own making. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez at her best: a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.
The Undocumented Americans by
One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation. Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants--and to find the hidden key to her own. Looking beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMers, Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented--and the mysteries of her own life. She finds the singular, effervescent characters across the nation often reduced in the media to political pawns or nameless laborers. The stories she tells are not deferential or naively inspirational but show the love, magic, heartbreak, insanity, and vulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects.
A Latino Memoir: Exploring Family, Identity and the Common Good by
Scholar Gerald Poyo looks back on the transnational experiences that shaped his family and life, including the loss of a Cuban homeland over several generations and growing up in Latin America as the son of a privileged American corporate employee.
Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family by
A young woman from Minnesota searches out the Colombian father she's never known in this powerful exploration of what family really means. He loved Colombia too much to leave it. The explanation from her Minnesotan mother was enough to satisfy a child's curiosity about her missing father. But at twenty-one, Anika Fajardo wanted more. She wanted to know her father better and to know what kind of country could have such a hold on him. And so, in 1995, Fajardo boarded a plane and flew to Colombia to discover a birthplace that was foreign to her and a father who was a stranger. There she learns that sometimes, no matter how many pieces you find, fitting together a family history isn't easy. With her tentative entry into her father's world, Fajardo steps on a path that will take her in surprising directions, toward unsuspected secrets about her family and herself. Set against the changing backdrops of Colombia and the American Midwest, her journey carries her back to the 1970s and the beginnings of her parents' broken marriage, and forward to the present day, where the magic and reality of love and heartache--and her own experience as a parent--await her. The way is strewn with obstacles, physical and metaphysical--from the perils encountered on a mountain road in Colombia to the death of a loved one to the birth of her own child--but the toughest to negotiate are the shifting place of memory and truth while coming to understand her place in her family and in the world. Vivid and heartfelt in the telling, Fajardo's story is powerfully compelling in its bridging of time and place and in its moving depiction of self-transformation. Family, she comes to find, is where you find it and what you make of it.
Queer Brown Voices by
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/os faced several forms of discrimination. The greater Latino community did not often accept sexual minorities, and the mainstream LGBT movement expected everyone, regardless of their ethnic and racial background, to adhere to a specific set of priorities so as to accommodate a "unified" agenda. To disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism, and homophobia that they experienced, LGBT Latinas/os organized themselves on local, state, and national levels, forming communities in which they could fight for equal rights while simultaneously staying true to both their ethnic and sexual identities. Yet histories of LGBT activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s often reduce the role that Latinas/os played, resulting in misinformation, or ignore their work entirely, erasing them from history. Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light not only on the organizations they helped to create and operate, but also on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.
Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds by
Nepantla Familias brings together Mexican American narratives that explore and negotiate the many permutations of living in between different worlds--how the authors or their characters create, or fail to create, a cohesive identity amid the contradictions in their lives. Nepantla--or living in the in-between space of the borderland--is the focus of this anthology. The essays, poems, and short stories explore the in-between moments in Mexican American life--the family dynamics of living between traditional and contemporary worlds, between Spanish and English, between cultures with traditional and shifting identities. In times of change, family values are either adapted or discarded in the quest for self-discovery, part of the process of selecting and composing elements of a changing identity. Edited by award-winning writer and scholar Sergio Troncoso, this anthology includes works from familiar and acclaimed voices such as David Dorado Romo, Sandra Cisneros, Alex Espinoza, Reyna Grande, and Francisco Cantú, as well as from important new voices, such as Stephanie Li, David Dominguez, and ire'ne lara silva. These are writers who open and expose the in-between places: through or at borders; among the past, present, and future; from tradition to innovation; between languages; in gender; about the wounds of the past and the victories of the present; of life and death. Nepantla Familias shows the quintessential American experience that revives important foundational values through immigrants and the children of immigrants. Here readers will find a glimpse of contemporary Mexican American experience; here, also, readers will experience complexities of the geographic, linguistic, and cultural borders common to us all.
Afterlife: A Novel by
Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves--lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack--but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including--maybe especially--members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?
Oy, Caramba! An Anthology of Jewish Stories from Latin America by
Jewish identity and magical realism are the themes of the tales of adventure and cultural alienation collected here by the leading authority on Jewish Latin American literature. First published in 1994 as Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers, Ilan Stavans's classic anthology is expanded and updated in this new edition.
Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad by
In this new study, Ylce Irizarry moves beyond literature that prioritizes assimilation to examine how contemporary fiction depicts being Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, or Puerto Rican within Chicana/o and Latina/o America. Irizarry establishes four dominant categories of narrative--loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory--that address immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural nationalisms, and neocolonialism. As she shows, narrative concerns have moved away from the weathered notions of arrival and assimilation. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures instead tell stories that have little, if anything, to do with integration into the Anglo-American world. The result is the creation of new memory. This reformulation of cultural membership unmasks the neocolonial story and charts the conscious engagement of cultural memory. It outlines the ways contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o communities create belonging and memory of their ethnic origins. An engaging contribution to an important literary tradition, Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction privileges the stories Chicanas/os and Latinas/os remember about themselves rather than the stories of those subjugating them.
Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century by
In Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century, Tace Hedrick illuminates how discourses of Americanization, ethnicity, gender, class, and commodification shape the genre of "chica lit," popular fiction written by Latina authors with Latina characters. She argues that chica lit is produced and marketed in the same ways as contemporary romance and chick lit fiction, and aimed at an audience of twenty- to thirty-something upwardly mobile Latina readers. Its stories about young women's ethnic class mobility and gendered romantic success tend to celebrate twenty-first century neoliberal narratives about Americanization, hard work, and individual success. However, Hedrick emphasizes, its focus on Latina characters necessarily inflects this celebratory mode: the elusiveness of meaning in its use of the very term "Latina" empties out the differences among and between Latina/o and Chicano/a groups in the United States. Of necessity, chica lit also struggles with questions about the actual social and economic "place" of Latinas and Chicanas in this same neoliberal landscape; these questions unsettle its reliance on the tried-and-true formulas of chick lit and romance writing. Looking at chica lit's market-driven representations of difference, poverty, and Americanization, Hedrick shows how this writing functions within the larger arena of struggles over popular representation of Latinas and Chicanas.
My Book of the Dead: New Poems by
For more than thirty years, Ana Castillo has been mesmerizing and inspiring readers from all over the world with her passionate and fiery poetry and prose. Now the original Xicanista is back to her first literary love, poetry, and to interrogating the social and political upheaval the world has seen over the last decade. Angry and sad, playful and wise, Castillo delves into the bitter side of our world--the environmental crisis, COVID-19, ongoing systemic racism and violence, children in detention camps, and the Trump presidency--and emerges stronger from exploring these troubling affairs of today. Drawings by Castillo created over the past five years are featured throughout the collection and further showcase her connection to her work as both a writer and a visual artist. My Book of the Dead is a remarkable collection that features a poet at the height of her craft.
Cenzontle: Poems by
In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn--sometimes all at once.
Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets by
We defy translation, Sandra Maria Esteves writes. Nameless / we are a whole culture / once removed. She is half Dominican, half Puerto Rican, with indigenous and African blood, born in the Bronx. Like so many of the contributors, she is a blend of cultures, histories and languages.Containing the work of more than 40 poets-equally divided between men and women-who self-identify as Afro-Latino, !Manteca! is the first poetry anthology to highlight writings by Latinos of African descent. The themes covered are as diverse as the authors themselves. Many pieces rail against a system that institutionalizes poverty and racism. Others remember parents and grandparents who immigrated to the United States in search of a better life, only to learn that the American Dream is a nightmare for someone with dark skin and nappy hair. But in spite of hardship, faith remains. Anthony Morales' grandmother, like so many others, was hardwired to hold on to hope. There are love poems to families and lovers. And music-salsa, merengue, jazz-permeates this collection. Editor and scholar Melissa Castillo-Garsow writes in her introduction that the experiences and poetic expression of Afro-Latinidad were so diverse that she could not begin to categorize it. Some write in English, others in Spanish. They are Puerto Rican, Dominican, and almost every combination conceivable, including Afro-Mexican.
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter by
Textured with the sights and sounds of growing up in East New York in the nineties, to school on the South Side of Chicago, all the way to the olive groves of Palestine, My Mother Is a Freedom Fighter is Aja Monet's ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters--the tiny gods who fight to change the world. Complemented by striking cover art from Carrie Mae Weems, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.
Unaccompanied by
Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind. Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and 'the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.'
An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers--Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth--united in resistance on the first "Day Without Immigrants." As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of "America First" rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights. 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award
This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man's attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. "You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story." When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary. With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family's encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father's deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother's heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor. Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.
In this stunning debut, poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch. José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is a co-host of the podcast, The Poetry Gods. A winner of fellowships from Poets House, The Bronx Council On The Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and The Conversation Literary Festival, his work has been published in The BreakBeat Poets and elsewhere. He is the Marketing Manager at Young Chicago Authors.
Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago--"one day, you'll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure." Javier Zamora's adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a "coyote" hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks. At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents' arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family. A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora's story, but it's also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.
Known as "The Salad Bowl of the World," California's Salinas Valley became an agricultural empire due to the toil of diverse farmworkers, including Latinos. A sweeping critical history of how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants organized for their rights in the decades leading up to the seminal strikes led by Cesar Chavez, this important work also looks closely at how different groups of Mexicans--U.S. born, bracero, and undocumented--confronted and interacted with one another during this period. An incisive study of labor, migration, race, gender, citizenship, and class, Lori Flores's first book offers crucial insights for today's ever-growing U.S. Latino demographic, the farmworker rights movement, and future immigration policy.
It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro 'Prieto' Acevedo, are bold-faced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying, Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn, while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's power brokers. Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the one percent, but she can't seem to find her own . . . until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets. Twenty-seven years ago, their mother, Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives. Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife and the very notion of the American dream - all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.
Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed. But it's not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister's story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal?
Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: "I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible." Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope--in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
The Chicano Studies Reader, the best-selling anthology of articles from Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, has been newly expanded with a group of essays that focus on Chicana/o and Latina/o youth. This section, Generations against Exclusion, joins Decolonizing the Territory, Performing Politics, (Re)Configuring Identities, Remapping the World, and Continuing to Push Boundaries. Introductions to each section offer analysis and contextualization. This fourth edition of the Reader documents the foundation of Chicano studies, testifies to its broad disciplinary range, and explores its continuing development.
Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge. This wisdom is based on the authors' oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences--wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces--a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms--in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.
A new history reveals how the rise of the Latino vote has redrawn the political map and what it portends for the future of American politics. The impact of the Latino vote is a constant subject of debate among pundits and scholars. Will it sway elections? And how will the political parties respond to the growing number of voters who identify as Latino? A more basic and revealing question, though, is how the Latino vote was forged--how U.S. voters with roots in Latin America came to be understood as a bloc with shared interests. In The Rise of the Latino Vote, Benjamin Francis-Fallon shows how this diverse group of voters devised a common political identity and how the rise of the Latino voter has transformed the electoral landscape. Latino political power is a recent phenomenon. It emerged on the national scene during the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, when Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American activists, alongside leaders in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, began to conceive and popularize a pan-ethnic Hispanic identity. Despite the increasing political potential of a unified Latino vote, many individual voters continued to affiliate more with their particular ethnic communities than with a broader Latino constituency. The search to resolve this contradiction continues to animate efforts to mobilize Hispanic voters and define their influence on the American political system. The "Spanish-speaking vote" was constructed through deliberate action; it was not simply demographic growth that led the government to recognize Hispanics as a national minority group, ushering in a new era of multicultural politics. As we ponder how a new generation of Latino voters will shape America's future, Francis-Fallon uncovers the historical forces behind the changing face of America.
Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers--especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami's determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she doesn't know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can't stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.
Against the background of a thousand years of vivid history, acclaimed writer Marie Arana tells the timely and timeless stories of three contemporary Latin Americans whose lives represent three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 feet above sea level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the highest human habitation on earth. Like her late husband, she works the gold mines much as the Indians were forced to do at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease reign as they did five hundred years ago. And now, just as then, a miner's survival depends on a vast global market whose fluctuations are controlled in faraway places. Carlos Buergos is a Cuban who fought in the civil war in Angola and now lives in a quiet community outside New Orleans. He was among hundreds of criminals Cuba expelled to the US in 1980. His story echoes the violence that has coursed through the Americas since before Columbus to the crushing savagery of the Spanish Conquest, and from 19th- and 20th-century wars and revolutions to the military crackdowns that convulse Latin America to this day. Xavier Albó is a Jesuit priest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia, where he works among the indigenous people. He considers himself an Indian in head and heart and, for this, is well known in his adopted country. Although his aim is to learn rather than proselytize, he is an inheritor of a checkered past, where priests marched alongside conquistadors, converting the natives to Christianity, often forcibly, in the effort to win the New World. Ever since, the Catholic Church has played a central role in the political life of Latin America--sometimes for good, sometimes not. In Silver, Sword, and Stone Marie Arana seamlessly weaves these stories with the history of the past millennium to explain three enduring themes that have defined Latin America since pre-Columbian times: the foreign greed for its mineral riches, an ingrained propensity to violence, and the abiding power of religion. What emerges is a vibrant portrait of a people whose lives are increasingly intertwined with our own.
From Chicago to Mexico, the places Sandra Cisneros has lived have provided inspiration for her now-classic works of fiction and poetry. But a house of her own, a place where she could truly take root, has eluded her. In this jigsaw autobiography, made up of essays and images spanning three decades--and including never-before-published work--Cisneros has come home at last. Written with her trademark lyricism, in these signature pieces the acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street and winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature shares her transformative memories and reveals her artistic and intellectual influences. Poignant, honest, and deeply moving, A House of My Own is an exuberant celebration of a life lived to the fullest, from one of our most beloved writers.
Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry collects personal and academic writing from Latino, Latin American, Latinx, and Luso poets about the nature of poetry and its practice. At the heart of this anthology lies the intersection of history, language, and the human experience. The collection explores the ways in which a people's history and language are vital to the development of a poet's imagination and insists that the meaning and value of poetry are necessary to understand the history and future of a people. The Latinx community is not a monolith, and accordingly the poets assembled here vary in style, language, and nationality. The pieces selected expose the depth of existing verse and scholarship by poets and scholars including Brenda Cárdenas, Daniel Borzutzky, Orlando Menes, and over a dozen more. The essays not only expand the poetic landscape but extend Latinx and Latin American linguistic and geographical boundaries. Writers, educators, and students will find awareness, purpose, and inspiration in this one-of-a-kind anthology.
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