Library Guides: Latinx Heritage Month Exhibit 2021: Other Recent Latinx Books

Other Recent Latinx Books

Here is a short selection of recent Latinx fiction. Use the tabs above to view different book lists. Enjoy!

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The Affairs of the Falcóns: a Novel by Melissa Rivero Ana Falcón, along with her husband Lucho and their two young children, has fled the economic and political strife of Peru for a chance at a new life in New York City in the 1990s. Being undocumented, however, has significantly curtailed the family's opportunities: Ana is indebted to a loan shark who calls herself Mama, and is stretched thin by unceasing shifts at her factory job. To make matters worse, Ana must also battle both criticism from Lucho's cousin--who has made it obvious the family is not welcome to stay in her spare room for much longer--and escalating and unwanted attention from Mama's husband. As the pressure builds, Ana becomes increasingly desperate. While Lucho dreams of returning to Peru, Ana is deeply haunted by the demons she left behind and determined to persevere in this new country. But how many sacrifices is she willing to make before admitting defeat and returning to Peru? And what lines is she willing to cross in order to protect her family? The Affairs of the Falcóns is a beautiful, deeply urgent novel about the lengths one woman is willing to go to build a new life, and a vivid rendering of the American immigrant experience. 
Call Number: PS3618.I854 A68 2019
ISBN: 9780062872357
Publication Date: 2019-04-02
Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas Mauro Javier Cárdenas, the critically-acclaimed author ofThe Revolutionaries Try Again--"an original, insubordinate novel" (New York Times)--pens a profound story of literature about a man coming to terms with his dysfunctional Colombian family, as well as his own behavior, as an immigrant in America. Antonio wants to avoid thinking about his sister--even though he knows he won't be able to avoid thinking about his sister--because his sister is on the run after allegedly threatening to shoot her neighbors, and has been claiming that Antonio, Obama, the Pentagon, and their mother are all conspiring against her. Nevertheless, Antonio is going to try his best to be as avoidant as possible, because he worries that what's been happening to his sister might somehow infect his relatively contented, ordered American life, and destabilize the precarious arrangement with his ex-wife that's allowed him to stay close to his two daughters. In fact, he's busy doing everything except facing his problems head-on: transcribing recordings of his mother speaking about their troubled life in Colombia, transcribing recordings of his ex-wife speaking about her idyllic life in the Czech Republic; writing about former girlfriends whose words and deeds still recur in his mind; rereading stories by American writers that allow him to skirt the subject of his sister's state of mind without completely destroying his own. Written in long, unravelling sentences that accommodate all the detritus of thought--scenes real and imagined, headphones and heartache, Toblerones and Thomas Bernhard--Aphasia captures the immensity of the present moment as well as the pain of the past. It cements Mauro Javier Cárdenas's place as one of the most innovative and extraordinary novelists working today.
Call Number: PS3603 A7346 A87 2020
ISBN: 9780374257866
Publication Date: 2020-11-03
Ballad of a Slopsucker: Stories by Juan Alvarado Valdivia A young widower visits Chichén Itzá to honor his wife; family dynamics unravel at a child's birthday party; the lead singer of a high school metal band faces his dreaded tenth reunion; a serial killer believes he's been blessed by God to murder bicycle thieves--Alvarado Valdivia's debut collection of short stories ranges from dark to light and is written with a storyteller's skill and compassion. Based in Northern California and examining a variety of themes, including love, family, and masculinity, these stories offer an important new perspective on the experiences of Latinos and Latinas in the United States and complicate ideas of nationhood, identity, and the definition of home.
Call Number: PS3601.L86667 A6 2019
ISBN: 9780826360571
Publication Date: 2019-02-15
Cruel Fiction by Wendy Trevino Cruel Fiction brings together new material with celebrated work published here for the first time in book form, including the provocative and charged "Brazilian Is Not a Race," a sonnet sequence meditating on race, nation, and history seen from the author's native Rio Grande Valley; it also includes widely-circulated "128-131," a caustic, hilarious, tender account memorializing three days in jail during the Occupy movement, one of the many insurgencies that provide the context and kinesis of this powerful collection. This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle through our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle.
Call Number: PS3620 R4495 A6 2018x
ISBN: 9781934639252
Publication Date: 2018-09-11
Dominicana by Angie Cruz Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn't matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year's Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wifeconfined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan's free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay. As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family's assets, leaving Cesar to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, see a movie at Radio City Music Hall, go dancing with Cesar, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family. In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Angie Cruz'sDominicanais a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.
Call Number: PS3603.R89 D66 2019
ISBN: 9781250205933
Publication Date: 2019-09-03
Grieving for Guava: Stories by Cecilia M. Fernandez Castro's communist regime gained control of Cuba in 1959, sparking a surge of immigration to the United States, particularly Miami, as refugees sought a better life. But for many, Cuba will always be home. The island's stories pass from refugee to refugee, immigrant to grandchild, mingling hope for the future with grief for what's lost. Yet these stories also pass down a deep, unconscious desire for the unattainable, which often results in fractured relationships and a loss of purpose for both young and old. Grieving for Guava revels in the unbroken ties between past and future, Havana and Miami, and recounts the unintended generational costs of immigration. Ten stories explore the lives of Cuban refugees in Miami as they grapple with a longing for the past and a fervent need to move forward. Spanning six decades of the Cuban exile, these stories lay bare a collective struggle to overcome the destabilizing effects of migration and to reassemble splintered identities: A journalist returns to the island for a childhood toy. An investment banker leaves Miami to open a bookstore near the Malecon. A girl with cerebral palsy attempts to swim across the ocean to reach her lost home. Cecilia Fernandez artfully weaves together the complicated lives of her characters to produce an overarching sense of yearning for the past, transforming grief into an even more powerful force: communion. Grieving for Guava captures the heartache and hope that are common in the immigrant experience, adding a dynamic, human voice to the politically charged dialogue surrounding immigration.
Call Number: PS3606.E73344 A6 2020
ISBN: 9780813178974
Publication Date: 2020-04-21
Halsey Street by Naima Coster Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. A modern-day story of family, loss, and renewal, Halsey Street captures the deeply human need to belong--not only to a place but to one another. Penelope Grand has scrapped her failed career as an artist in Pittsburgh and moved back to Brooklyn to keep an eye on her ailing father. She's accepted that her future won't be what she'd dreamed, but now, as gentrification has completely reshaped her old neighborhood, even her past is unrecognizable. Old haunts have been razed, and wealthy white strangers have replaced every familiar face in Bed-Stuy. Even her mother, Mirella, has abandoned the family to reclaim her roots in the Dominican Republic. That took courage. It's also unforgivable. When Penelope moves into the attic apartment of the affluent Harpers, she thinks she's found a semblance of family--and maybe even love. But her world is upended again when she receives a postcard from Mirella asking for reconciliation. As old wounds are reopened, and secrets revealed, a journey across an ocean of sacrifice and self-discovery begins. An engrossing debut, Halsey Street shifts between the perspectives of these two captivating, troubled women. Mirella has one last chance to win back the heart of the daughter she'd lost long before leaving New York, and for Penelope, it's time to break free of the hold of the past and start navigating her own life.
Call Number: PS3603 O86814 H35 2017
ISBN: 9781503941175
Publication Date: 2018-01-01
Kafka in a Skirt: Stories from the Wall by Daniel Chacón Kafka in a Skirt is not your ordinary short story collection. In his newest work, Daniel Chacón subverts expectation and breaks down the walls of reality to create stories that are intriguing, hilarious, and deeply rooted in Chicano culture.
Call Number: PS3553.H215 A6 2019; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 9780816539918
Publication Date: 2019-10-29
Latin@ Rising: An Anthology of Latin@ Science Fiction and Fantasy by Matthew David Goodwin, ed., Frederick Luis Aldama (Intro) Latin@ Rising is the first anthology of science fiction and fantasy written by Latinos/as living in the United States. The 22 authors and artists included in this anthology come from all over the U.S. and from eight different national traditions. They include well-known creators like Kathleen Alcalá, Pablo Brescia, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Ana Castillo, Junot Díaz, Richie Narvaez, Giannina Braschi, and Daniel José Older; they also include new voices, well worth hearing. The book gives an overview to the field of Latino/a speculative, showing the great variety of stories being told by Latino/a writers. Fifty years ago the Latin American "Boom" introduced magical realism to the world; Latin@ Rising is the literature that has risen from the explosion that gave us García Márquez, Jorge Amado, Carlos Fuentes and others. The 21st century writers and artists of Latin@ Rising help us to imagine a Latino/a past, present, and future which have not been whitewashed by mainstream perspectives. Contrary to the popular perception, Latino/a Literature is not just magical realism and social realist protest literature--it also contains much speculative fiction. By showing the actual breadth of genres being used by Latino/a authors, Latin@ Rising will help extend the boundaries of the Latino/a literature canon. Latin@ Rising demonstrates the value of speculative fiction for the Latino/a community: it gives Latinos/as a vital means for imagining a past and a future in which they play a pivotal role, and it constitutes a narrative of the effects of technology on the Latino/a community. The book shows how the richness of the speculative genres provide U.S. Latinos/as with a unique medium to discuss issues of colonialism, migration, and the experience of being bicultural.
Call Number: PS508 H57 L36 2017
ISBN: 9781609405243
Publication Date: 2017-01-01
Loteria : A Novel by Mario Alberto Zambrano In Lotería, the spellbinding literary debut by Mario Alberto Zambrano, a young girl tells the story of her family's tragic demise using a deck of cards of the eponymous Latin American game of chance.   With her older sister Estrella in the ICU and her father in jail, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo has been taken into the custody of the state. Alone in her room, she retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through a deck of lotería cards. Each of the cards' colorful images--mermaids, bottles, spiders, death, and stars--sparks a random memory.   Pieced together, these snapshots bring into focus the joy and pain of the young girl's life, and the events that led to her present situation. But just as the story becomes clear, a breathtaking twist changes everything. Beautiful full-color images of lotería cards are featured throughout this intricate and haunting novel.
Call Number: PS3626 A6277 L68x 2013
ISBN: 0062268546
Publication Date: 2013-07-02
Love War Stories by Ivelisse Rodriguez Puerto Rican girls are brought up to want one thing: true love. Yet they are raised by women whose lives are marked by broken promises, grief, and betrayal. While some believe that they'll be the ones to finally make it work, others swear not to repeat cycles of violence. This collection documents how these "love wars" break out across generations as individuals find themselves caught in the crosshairs of romance, expectations, and community.
Call Number: PS3618 O35825 A6 2018
ISBN: 1936932253
Publication Date: 2018-07-10
Made in Saturn by Rita Indiana; Sydney Hutchinson (Translator) These are the children of revolutions, and this is their story. This is the Caribbean. This is Argenis Luna: an artist who no longer paints, a heroin addict who no longer uses, and an overgrown child trying to make sense of his inheritance in a country where his once-revolutionary father is now part of the ruling elite. Thrown out of rehab in Havana, with Goya's tyrannical god Saturn on his mind, Argenis picks his way through the detritus of an abandoned generation: the drag queens, artists, hustlers and lovers trying to build lives amidst the wreckage. Mesmerising and visionary,Made in Saturn is a hangover from a riotous funeral, a rapid-fire elegy for the revolutionary spirit, and a glimpse of hope for all who feel eclipsed by those who came before them.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781911508601
Publication Date: 2020-03-03
Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia AN INSTANTNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt. From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals--personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others--that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America's most tangled, honest, human roots.
Call Number: PS3607.A721833 O38 2021
ISBN: 9781250776686
Publication Date: 2021-03-30
A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son: Stories by Sergio Troncoso How does a Mexican-American, the son of immigrants, a child of the border, la frontera, leave home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? With echoes of Dreiser'sAmerican Tragedy and Fitzgerald'sGatsby, Troncoso tells his luminous stories through the lens of an exile adrift in the 21st century, his characters suffering from the loss of culture and language, the loss of roots and home as they adapt to the glittering promises of new worlds which ultimately seem so empty. Sergio Troncosois the author of the collectionsA Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, and the novelsThe Nature of Truth andFrom This Wicked Patch of Dust. He's taught at the Yale Writers' Workshop for many years. Troncoso is President of the Texas Institute of Letters and a member of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund's Alumni Hall of Fame. A Fulbright scholar, he has won numerous awards, including the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, International Latino Book Award, the Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, and the Southwest Book Award. He was born in El Paso, Texas, and attended Harvard College and Yale University, where he earned graduate degrees in international relations and philosophy.
Call Number: PS3570.R5876 A6 2019
ISBN: 9781947627338
Publication Date: 2019-10-15
Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-short Stories from the United States and Latin America by Ray Gonzalez; Robert Shapard; James Thomas For readers who love great short-short stories, this bountiful anthology is the best of Latin American and U.S. Latino writers. Following on the success of the Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction series, Robert Shapard and James Thomas join with Ray Gonzalez in selecting works that each present a complete story in less than 1,500 words. Luisa Valenzuela, one of Latin America's most lauded writers, provides the introduction. Readers will delight in finding stars such as Junot Díaz, Sandra Cisneros, and Roberto Bolano alongside recognized masters like Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges. They will discover work from Andrea Saenz, Daniel Alarcón, and Alicita Rodriguez, as well as other writers on the rise. In Julio Ortega's "Migrations," a Peruvian writer explores how immigrant speech and ethnic origins are a force of meaning that evolves beyond language. In "Hair," by Hilma Contreras, a Caribbean pharmacist is driven mad by a young woman's luxuriant tresses. These stories stretch from gritty reality to the fantastical in a mix that is moving, challenging, humorous, artful, sometimes political, and altogether spectacular.
Call Number: PS508 H57 S844 2010
ISBN: 9780393336450
Publication Date: 2010-03-01
The Taste of Sugar: A Novel by Marisel Vera It is 1898, and groups of starving Puerto Ricans, los hambrientos, roam the parched countryside and dusty towns begging for food. Under the yoke of Spanish oppression, the Caribbean island is forced to prepare to wage war with the United States. Up in the mountainous coffee region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their small farm from the creditors. When the Spanish-American War and the great San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899 bring devastating upheaval, the young couple is lured, along with thousands of other puertorriquenos, to the sugar plantations of Hawaii--another US territory--where they are confronted by the hollowness of America's promises of prosperity. Writing in the tradition of great Latin American storytelling, Marisel Vera's The Taste of Sugar is an unforgettable novel of love and endurance, and a timeless portrait of the reasons we leave home.
Call Number: PS3622.E7 T37 2020
ISBN: 9781631497735
Publication Date: 2020-06-16
Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores A parallel universe. South Texas. A third border wall might be erected between the United States and Mexico, narcotics are legal and there's a new contraband on the market: filtered animals--species of animals brought back from extinction to amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life gets complicated after a swashbuckling journalist invites him to an underground dinner at which filtered animals are served. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous and surreal journey, in the course of which he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers. Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores'sTears of the Trufflepigis an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, and an introduction to a staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction.
Call Number: PS3606.L5886 T43 2019
ISBN: 9780374538330
Publication Date: 2019-05-14
Tentacle by Rita Indiana; Achy Obejas (Translator) Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean - and humanity - from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was - with the help of a sacred anemone.Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it's a restless, addictive trip:The Tempest meets the telenovela.
Call Number: PQ7409.2 H355 M8313 2018
ISBN: 9781911508342
Publication Date: 2019-01-15
This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album by Alan Chazaro In his debut short collection, poet Alan Chazaro takes us from the moonlit Bay Bridge to dark Oakland bars to tire shops to backyards to the fireworks and dirt paths of Mexico City. Chazaro’s speakers battle to find internal truths in a world defined by external opposition. Here, we glide from Frank Ocean to 80s synthpop, from Half Moon Bay to Athens, from Oscar De La Hoya to Wolverine. This is a collection about navigating multiple worlds, about traversing from boyhood into manhood. In poems that crackle with “scorpions in the dark” and “Lauryn Hill’s voodoo” and “fat / Adidas laces and barbershop fades$$ Chazaro explores what it means to curate a sense of self as a millennial first-generation California Chicanx writer. His speakers are driven by a desire to control their identity in a world where they haven’t been able to control much else-as the children of immigrants, as the occupants of ever-shifting spaces, as bodies that belong and don’t belong. Structured like a rap mixtape, each poem on the “track list” is an ode to some vibration of memory, sound, or Chazaro’s native Bay Area landscape. This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, just as we are not ever actually ourselves-but a collection of fragments from our component influences and cultures, a reflection of the choices we make in search of a more genuine self.
Call Number: PS3603 H393 T49x 2019
ISBN: 9781625578259
Publication Date: 2019-09-24
The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States by Leticia Hernández Linares (Editor); Rubén Martínez (Editor); Héctor Tobar; Juan José Dalton Tia Chucha Press is proud to reprint by popular demand this anthology of work by Central American writers living in the United States. The Wandering Song captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latinx groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a US publisher--perfect for high school, college, or university courses in US literature, Latinx literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies. A multi-genre collection featuring poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction, the anthology showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences: of refugees from the wars of the 1980s, of those who barely remember the homeland, and of those who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. It is a community that shares not only a history of violence--both here and back home--but the hope and healing that ensures its survival. The writers include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle--El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras--considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.
Call Number: PS508 H57 W36x 2017
ISBN: 9781882688531
Publication Date: 2017-04-15
Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed: 15 Voices from the Latinx Diaspora by Saraciea J. Fennell (Editor) A Most Anticipated Book (Refinery29, HipLatina, Publishers Weekly, Latino Book Review, Elle, Al Día, and more)! Edited by The Bronx Is Reading founder Saraciea J. Fennell and featuring an all-star cast of Latinx contributors, Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed is a ground-breaking anthology that will spark dialogue and inspire hope. In Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed, bestselling and award-winning authors as well as up-and-coming voices interrogate the different myths and stereotypes about the Latinx diaspora. These fifteen original pieces delve into everything from ghost stories and superheroes, to memories in the kitchen and travels around the world, to addiction and grief, to identity and anti-Blackness, to finding love and speaking your truth. Full of both sorrow and joy, Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed is an essential celebration of this rich and diverse community. The bestselling and award-winning contributors include Elizabeth Acevedo, Cristina Arreola, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Naima Coster, Natasha Diaz, Saraciea J. Fennell, Kahlil Haywood, Zakiya Jamal, Janel Martinez, Jasminne Mendez, Meg Medina, Mark Oshiro, Julian Randall, Lilliam Rivera, and Ibi Zoboi.
Call Number: PS508 H57 W55 2021
ISBN: 9781250763426
Publication Date: 2021-11-02

Here is a short selection of recent Latinx memoirs and biographies. Use the tabs above to view different book lists. Enjoy!

Colombian flag graphic

Bruja: A Dreamoir by Wendy C. Ortiz "In Bruja, Wendy C. Ortiz deftly navigates the land of dreams in what she calls a dreamoir. By telling us her dreams, by revealing her most unguarded and vulnerable self, Ortiz is, truly, offering readers the most intimate parts of herself--how she loves, how she wants, how she lives, who she is. Bruja is not just a book--it is an enigma and a wonder and utterly entrancing." --Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
Call Number: PS3615 R833 B79x 2016
ISBN: 9781937865696
Publication Date: 2016-10-31
The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California--fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong. "Impeccably timed, intimately reported, and beautifully expressed."--The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * WINNER OF THE RIDENHOUR BOOK PRIZE * SILVER WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores--until, at age seventeen, a deadly threat from the region's brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they've ever known. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of teenage life with only each other for support. With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience. FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE * SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE * LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/BOGRAD WELD PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY "[This] beautifully written book . . . can be read as a supplement to the current news, a chronicle of the problems that Central Americans are fleeing and the horrors they suffer in flight. But it transcends the crisis. Markham's deep, frank reporting is also useful in thinking ahead to the challenges of assimilation, for the struggling twins and many others like them. . . . Her reporting is intimate and detailed, and her tone is a special pleasure. Trustworthy, calm, decent, it offers refuge from a world consumed by Twitter screeds and cable news demagogues. . . . A generous book for an ungenerous age."--Jason DeParle, The New York Review of Books "You should read The Far Away Brothers. We all should."--NPR "This is the sort of news that is the opposite of fake. . . . Markham is our knowing, compassionate ally, our guide in sorting out, up close, how our new national immigration policy is playing out from a human perspective. . . . An important book."--The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Call Number: E184.S15 M37 2017
ISBN: 9781101906187
Publication Date: 2017-09-12
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez The founder of Latina Rebels and a "Latinx Activist You Should Know"(Teen Vogue) arms women of color with the tools and knowledge they need to find success on their own terms   For generations, Brown girls have had to push against powerful forces of sexism, racism, and classism, often feeling alone in the struggle. By founding Latina Rebels, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez has created a community to help women fight together. In For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts, she offers wisdom and a liberating path forward for all women of color. She crafts powerful ways to address the challenges Brown girls face, from imposter syndrome to colorism. She empowers women to decolonize their worldview, and defy "universal" white narratives, by telling their own stories. Her book guides women of color toward a sense of pride and sisterhood and offers essential tools to energize a movement. May it spark a fire within you.
Call Number: E184 N53 M65 2021
ISBN: 9781541674875
Publication Date: 2021-09-07
I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary by Margaret Randall In 1969, poet and revolutionary Margaret Randall was forced underground when the Mexican government cracked down on all those who took part in the 1968 student movement. Needing to leave the country, she sent her four young children alone to Cuba while she scrambled to find safe passage out of Mexico. In I Never Left Home, Randall recounts her harrowing escape and the other extraordinary stories from her life and career. From living among New York's abstract expressionists in the mid-1950s as a young woman to working in the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture to instill revolutionary values in the media during the Sandinista movement, the story of Randall's life reads like a Hollywood production. Along the way, she edited a bilingual literary journal in Mexico City, befriended Cuban revolutionaries, raised a family, came out as a lesbian, taught college, and wrote over 150 books. Throughout it all, Randall never wavered from her devotion to social justice. When she returned to the United States in 1984 after living in Latin America for twenty-three years, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered her to be deported for her "subversive writing." Over the next five years, and with the support of writers, entertainers, and ordinary people across the country, Randall fought to regain her citizenship, which she won in court in 1989. As much as I Never Left Home is Randall's story, it is also the story of the communities of artists, writers, and radicals she belonged to. Randall brings to life scores of creative and courageous people on the front lines of creating a more just world. She also weaves political and social analyses and poetry into the narrative of her life. Moving, captivating, and astonishing, I Never Left Home is a remarkable story of a remarkable woman.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781478006183
Publication Date: 2020-03-13
Knitting the Fog by Claudia D Hernández "Knitting the Fog is a memoir of ten-year-old Claudia, a young Guatemalan girl, whose mother leaves for the United States to escape domestic abuse and pursue economic prosperity. When her mother returns three years later, she and her sisters begin a month-long journey to El Norte. Once settled in Los Angeles, California, Claudia has trouble assimilating, but when back in Guatemala, she finds that she no longer belongs there either. Hernández's debut depicts the struggle inherent to immigration today, combining both narrative essay and bilingual poetry"
Call Number: PS3608.E76595 Z46 2019 Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781936932559
Publication Date: 2019
The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive: Essays and Commentaries by Martin Espada; Martin Espada Prior praise for Martín Espada: "Political poetry at its finest...with his soaring lyrics, Espada broadens our appreciation not only of poetry but of resistance itself." ---The Progressive  "(Espada) writes beautiful poems about terrible realities." ---San Francisco Chronicle A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. This collection of essays on poetry and politics comes from the man the New York Times predicted would become "the Latino poet of his generation" and whom Sandra Cisneros called "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors." Martín Espada defends what Walt Whitman called, "the rights of them the others are down upon." He invokes the spirit of poet-advocates such as Whitman and Edgar Lee Masters to explore his own history as a poet and tenant lawyer in Boston's Latino community. He celebrates the poets of Puerto Rico, imprisoned for espousing the cause of independence, and the poets of the Bronx, writing bilingual poems in the voices of the dead. Espada writes of forgotten places and reminds us of the poet's responsibility to remember, as Pablo Neruda remembers the anonymous builders of Machu Picchu or Sterling Brown remembers the slave uprising of Nat Turner. He argues that poets should embrace the role of Shelley's "unacknowledged legislator" in their work as writers and in their lives as citizens. He challenges the conventional wisdom that poetry and politics are mutually exclusive, and rejects the poetics of self-marginalization, in keeping with Adrian Mitchell's dictum that, "most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people." Martín Espada has published seventeen books as a poet, editor, and translator. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems, received a Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Imagine the Angels of Bread won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award. Espada is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Call Number: PS3555 S53 Z46 2010
ISBN: 9780472051472
Publication Date: 2010-09-09
Music to My Years: A Mixtape-memoir of Growing Up and Standing Up by Cristela Alonzo In this memoir full of humor and heart, comedian, writer, and producer Cristela Alonzo shares personal stories of growing up as a first-generation Mexican-American in Texas and following her dreams to pursue a career in comedy. When Cristela Alonzo and her family lived as squatters in an abandoned diner, they only had two luxuries: a television and a radio, which became her pop cultural touchstone and a guiding light. Cristela shares her experiences and struggles of being a first-generation American, her dreams of becoming a comedian, and how it feels to be a creator in a world that often minimizes people of color and women. Her stories range from the ridiculous--like the time she made her own tap shoes out of bottle caps or how the theme song of The Golden Girls landed her in the principal's office--to the sobering moments, like how she turned to stand-up comedy to grieve the heartbreaking loss of her mother and how, years later, she's committed to giving back to the community that helped make her. Each significant moment of the book relates to a song, and the resulting playlist is deeply moving, resonant, and unforgettable. Music to My Years will make you laugh, cry, and even inspire you to make a playlist of your own.
Call Number: PN2287.A544 A3 2019
ISBN: 9781501189203
Publication Date: 2019-10-08
My Broken Language: A Memoir by Quiara Alegría Hudes GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK * The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse. "Quiara Alegría Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories."--Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton and In the Heights   Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories--but first she'd have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She'd have to find her language.   Weaving together Hudes's love of books with the stories of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is an inspired exploration of home, memory, and belonging--narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.
Call Number: PS3608 U3234 Z46 2021 Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 9780399590047
Publication Date: 2021-04-06
My Time among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education by Jennine Capó Crucet From the author ofMake Your Home Among Strangers, essays on being an "accidental" American--an incisive look at the edges of identity for a woman of color in a society centered on whiteness In this sharp and candid collection of essays, critically acclaimed writer and first-generation American Jennine Capó Crucet explores the condition of finding herself a stranger in the country where she was born. Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her family's attempts to fit in with white American culture--beginning with their ill-fated plan to name her after the winner of the Miss America pageant. In prose that is both fearless and slyly humorous,My Time Among the Whitesexamines the sometimes hopeful, sometimes deeply flawed ways in which many Americans have learned to adapt, exist, and--in the face of all signals saying otherwise--perhaps even thrive in a country that never imagined them here.
Call Number: PS3603 R83 M9x 2019
ISBN: 9781250299437
Publication Date: 2019-09-03
My Time to Speak: Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race by Ilia Calderón An inspiring, timely, and conversation-starting memoir from the barrier-breaking and Emmy Award-winning journalist Ilia Calderón--the first Afro-Latina to anchor a high-profile newscast for a major Hispanic broadcast network in the United States--about following your dreams, overcoming prejudice, and embracing your identity. As a child, Ilia Calderón felt like a typical girl from Colombia. In Chocó, the Afro-Latino province where she grew up, your skin could be any shade and you'd still be considered blood. Race was a non-issue, and Ilia didn't think much about it--until she left her community to attend high school and college in Medellín. For the first time, she became familiar with horrifying racial slurs thrown at her both inside and outside of the classroom. From that point on, she resolved to become "deaf" to racism, determined to overcome it in every way she could, even when she was told time and time again that prominent castings weren't "for people like you." When a twist of fate presented her the opportunity of a lifetime at Telemundo in Miami, she was excited to start a new life, and identity, in the United States, where racial boundaries, she believed, had long since dissolved and equality was the rule. Instead, in her new life as an American, she faced a new type of racial discrimination, as an immigrant women of color speaking to the increasingly marginalized Latinx community in Spanish. Now, Ilia draws back the curtain on the ups and downs of her remarkable life and career. From personal inner struggles to professional issues--such as being directly threatened by a Ku Klux Klan member after an interview--she discusses how she built a new identity in the United States in the midst of racially charged violence and political polarization. Along the way, she'll show how she's overcome fear and confronted hate head on, and the inspirational philosophy that has always propelled her forward.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781982103866
Publication Date: 2020-08-04
Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America by Maria Hinojosa In Once I Was You, Maria Hinojosa shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago. She offers a personal and illuminating account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also sanctioned willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country's most vulnerable populations--charging us with the broken system we have today. An urgent call to fellow Americans to open their eyes to the immigration crisis and understand that it affects us all, this honest and heartrending memoir paints a vivid portrait of how we got here and what it means to be a survivor, a feminist, a citizen, and a journalist who owns her voice while striving for the truth. Also available in Spanish as Una vez fui tú.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781982128678
Publication Date: 2020-09-15
Ordinary Girls: A Memoir by Jaquira Díaz One of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping "There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime." --Julia Alvarez  In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn't find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover's Educated, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz's memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history--and reads as electrically as a novel.
Call Number: PS3604.I176 Z46 2019
ISBN: 1616209135
Publication Date: 2019-10-29
Parcels: Memories of Salvadoran Migration by Mike Anastario In light of new proposals to control undocumented migrants in the United States, Parcels prioritizes rural Salvadoran remembering in an effort to combat the collective amnesia that supports the logic of these historically myopic strategies. Mike Anastario investigates the social memories of individuals from a town he refers to as "El Norteño," a rural municipality in El Salvador that was heavily impacted by the Salvadoran Civil War, which in turn fueled a mass exodus to the United States. By working with two viajeros (travelers) who exchanged encomiendas (parcels containing food, medicine, documents, photographs and letters) between those in the U.S. and El Salvador, Anastario tells the story behind parcels and illuminates their larger cultural and structural significance. This narrative approach elucidates key arguments concerning the ways in which social memory permits and is shaped by structural violence, particularly the U.S. actions and policies that have resulted in the emotional and physical distress of so many Salvadorans. The book uses analyses of testimonies, statistics, memories of migration, the war and, of course, the many parcels sent over the border to create an innovative and necessary account of post-Civil War El Salvador. 
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9780813595238
Publication Date: 2019-05-03
Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging by Fred Arroyo Sown in Earth is a collection of personal memories that speak to the larger experiences of hardworking migratory men. Often forgotten or silenced, these men are honored and remembered in Sown in Earth through the lens of Arroyo's memories of his father. Arroyo recollects his father's anger and alcohol abuse as a reflection of his place in society, in which his dreams and disappointments are patterned by work and poverty, loss and displacement, memory and belonging. In Sown in Earth, Arroyo often roots his thoughts and feelings in place, expressing a deep connection to the small homes he inhabited in his childhood, his warm and hazy memories of his grandmother's kitchen in Puerto Rico, the rivers and creeks he fished, and the small cafés in Madrid that inspired writing and reflection in his adult years. Swirling in romantic moments and a refined love for literature, Arroyo creates a sense of belonging and appreciation for his life despite setbacks and complex anxieties along the way. By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences led him to become a writer. Sown in Earth is a shocking yet warm collage of memories that serves as more than a memoir or an autobiography. Rather, Arroyo recounts his youth through lyrical prose to humanize and immortalize the hushed lives of men like his father, honoring their struggle and claiming their impact on the writers and artists they raised.  
Call Number: PS3601.R725 S69 2020; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 0816541434
Publication Date: 2020-01-28
Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas by Roberto Lovato An LA Times Best Book of the Year * A New York Times Editors' Pick * A Newsweek 25 Best Fall Books * A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year "Gripping and beautiful. With the artistry of a poet and the intensity of a revolutionary, Lovato untangles the tightly knit skein of love and terror that connects El Salvador and the United States."   --Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes and Nickel and Dimed An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato's memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time--and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.  The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the most barbaric massacres and crimes against humanity in recent history.  Roberto returned from war-torn El Salvador to find the United States on the verge of unprecedented crises of its own. There, he channeled his own pain into activism and journalism, focusing his attention on how trauma affects individual lives and societies, and began the difficult journey of confronting the roots of his own trauma. As a child, Roberto endured a tumultuous relationship with his father Ramón. Raised in extreme poverty in the countryside of El Salvador during one of the most violent periods of its history, Ramón learned to survive by straddling intersecting underworlds of family secrets, traumatic silences, and dealing in black-market goods and guns. The repression of the violence in his life took its toll, however. Ramón was plagued with silences and fits of anger that had a profound impact on his youngest son, and which Roberto attributes as a source of constant reckoning with the violence and rebellion in his own life. In Unforgetting, Roberto interweaves his father's complicated history and his own with first-hand reportage on gang life, state violence, and the heart of the immigration crisis in both El Salvador and the United States. In doing so he makes the political personal, revealing the cyclical ways violence operates in our homes and our societies, as well as the ways hope and tenderness can rise up out of the darkness if we are courageous enough to unforget.
Call Number: E184 S15 L68x 2020
ISBN: 9780062938473
Publication Date: 2020-09-01
The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States by Leticia Hernández Linares (Editor); Rubén Martínez (Editor); Héctor Tobar; Juan José Dalton Tia Chucha Press is proud to reprint by popular demand this anthology of work by Central American writers living in the United States. The Wandering Song captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latinx groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a US publisher--perfect for high school, college, or university courses in US literature, Latinx literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies. A multi-genre collection featuring poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction, the anthology showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences: of refugees from the wars of the 1980s, of those who barely remember the homeland, and of those who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. It is a community that shares not only a history of violence--both here and back home--but the hope and healing that ensures its survival. The writers include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle--El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras--considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.
Call Number: PS508 H57 W36x 2017
ISBN: 9781882688531
Publication Date: 2017-04-15
We're Not Broken : Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia "This book is a message from autistic people to their parents, friends, teachers, coworkers and doctors showing what life is like on the spectrum. It's also my love letter to autistic people. For too long, we have been forced to navigate a world where all the road signs are written in another language." With a reporter's eye and an insider's perspective, Eric Garcia shows what it's like to be autistic across America. Garcia began writing about autism because he was frustrated by the media's coverage of it; the myths that the disorder is caused by vaccines, the narrow portrayals of autistic people as white men working in Silicon Valley. His own life as an autistic person didn't look anything like that. He is Latino, a graduate of the University of North Carolina, and works as a journalist covering politics in Washington D.C. Garcia realized he needed to put into writing what so many autistic people have been saying for years; autism is a part of their identity, they don't need to be fixed.  In We're Not Broken, Garcia uses his own life as a springboard to discuss the social and policy gaps that exist in supporting those on the spectrum. From education to healthcare, he explores how autistic people wrestle with systems that were not built with them in mind. At the same time, he shares the experiences of all types of autistic people, from those with higher support needs, to autistic people of color, to those in the LGBTQ community. In doing so, Garcia gives his community a platform to articulate their own needs, rather than having others speak for them, which has been the standard for far too long. 
Call Number: RC553 A88 G364 2021
ISBN: 9781328587848
Publication Date: 2021-08-03

Here is a short selection of recent Latinx non-fiction titles. Use the tabs above to view different book lists. Enjoy!

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Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist by Cynthia E. Orozco The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901?1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas?s Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento?s achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader.Bringing to light the economic and political transformations that swept through South Texas in the 1920s as ranching declined and agribusiness proliferated, Cynthia E. Orozco situates Sloss-Vento?s early years within the context of the Jim Crow/Juan Crow era. Recounting Sloss-Vento?s rise to prominence as a public intellectual, Orozco highlights a partnership with Alonso S. Perales, the principal founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Agent of Change explores such contradictions as Sloss-Vento?s tolerance of LULAC?s gender-segregated chapters, even though the activist was an outspoken critic of male privilege in the home and a decidedly progressive wife and mother. Inspiring and illuminating, this is a complete portrait of a savvy, brazen critic who demanded reform on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
Call Number: F391.4.S56 O76 2020; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781477319864
Publication Date: 2020-01-10
Agrarian Puerto Rico : Reconsidering Rural Economy and Society, 1899-1940 by César J. Ayala; Laird W. Bergad Fundamental tenets of colonial historiography are challenged by showing that US capital investment into this colony did not lead to the disappearance of the small farmer. Contrary to well-established narratives, quantitative data show that the increasing integration of rural producers within the US market led to differential outcomes, depending on pre-existing land tenure structures, capital requirements to initiate production, and demographics. These new data suggest that the colonial economy was not polarized into landless Puerto Rican rural workers on one side and corporate US capitalists on the other. The persistence of Puerto Rican small farmers in some regions and the expansion of local property ownership and production disprove this socioeconomic model. Other aspects of extant Puerto Rican historiography are confronted in order to make room for thorough analyses and new conclusions on the economy of colonial Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century.
Call Number: HD1852 .A93 2020; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 1108488463
Publication Date: 2020-01-30
Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-garde by Robb Hernández Honorable Mention, 2021 Latinx Studies Section Outstanding Book Award, given by the Latin American Studies Association Winner, 2020 Latino Book Awards in the LGBTQ+ Themed Section Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Critically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlán--as Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this period--developed a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artists in the current moment. Hernández offers a vocabulary for this multi-modal avant-garde--one that contests the heteromasculinity and ocular surveillance visited upon it by the larger Chicanx community, as well as the formally straight conditions of traditional archive-building, museum institutions, and the art world writ large. With a focus on works by Mundo Meza (1955-85), Teddy Sandoval (1949-1995), and Joey Terrill (1955- ), and with appearances by Laura Aguilar, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, Archiving an Epidemic composes a complex picture of queer Chicanx avant-gardisms. With over sixty images--many of which are published here for the first time--Hernández's work excavates this archive to question not what Chicanx art is, but what it could have been.
Call Number: HQ76.2.U5 H475 2019; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781479820832
Publication Date: 2019-11-19
Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz Starting around 70 years ago, white flight out of America's major cities caused rapid urban decline. Now we are witnessing a resurgence of American urbanism said to be the result of white people's return. But this account entirely passes over the stable immigrant communities who arrived and never left: as whites fled for the suburbs and exurbs in increasing numbers, Latin Americans immigrated to urban centres in even greater numbers. Barrio America charts the vibrant revival of American cities in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, arguing that we should attribute this revival to the influx of Latin American immigrants -- both legal and not. An award-winning historian and son of immigrants, Andrew Sandoval-Strausz recounts this untold history by focusing on the largest immigrant barrios in two of the nation's largest cities: Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff. These neighbourhoods were once classic examples of urban crisis: they reached their peak prosperity around 1950, afterwards losing residents, jobs, and opportunity, which destabilised urban public order. But after 1965, when Lyndon Johnson overturned the restrictive 1924 immigration law and a major agricultural crisis was convulsing Mexico, these neighbourhoods saw a record number of incoming Latin Americans. The nation's urban barrios are regularly portrayed as decaying districts plagued by crime and disorder, but in reality, over the past several decades, areas with growing immigrant populations have become some of the most dynamic, stable, and safe neighbourhoods in their cities. The new immigrants brought with them three distinctive cultural traditions -- penchants for public spaces, walking, and small entrepreneurship -- that have changed the American city for the better. Drawing on dozens of oral histories with migrantes themselves, Sandoval-Strausz places immigrant voices at the centre of the narrative, emphasising the choices of Latin American newcomers, the motivations that brought them to the United States, and the hopes that lay before them, their families, and their communities. Barrio America demonstrates how migrants have used their labour, their capital, and their culture to build a new metropolitan America.
Call Number: HT175 .S25 2019
ISBN: 9781541697249
Publication Date: 2019-11-12
The Battle for Paradise : Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein "Fearless necessary reporting . . . Klein exposes the 'battle of utopias' that is currently unfolding in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico--a battle that pits a pitilessly neoliberal plutocratic 'paradise' against a community movement with Puerto Rican sovereignty at its center." --Junot Díaz "We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?" --Yulin Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich "Puertopians" are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation's radical, resilient vision for a "just recovery." All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. For more information, visit http://juntegente.org/. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, documentary filmmaker and author of the international bestsellers No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, and No Is Not Enough.
Call Number: HC154.5 Z9 D4555 2018
ISBN: 1608465861
Publication Date: 2018-06-05
Decolonial Puerto Rican Women's Writings: Subversion in the Flesh by Roberta Hurtado This book explores representations of sentient-flesh -- flesh that holds consciousness of being -- in Puerto Rican women's literature. It considers how different literary devices can participate in the decolonization of the flesh as it is obfuscated by mappings of the 'body' from the Enlightenment era and colonial endeavors. Drawing on studies of cognitive development and epigenetics to identify how sentient-flesh creates knowledge of power and navigates methods of subversion for social justice, this book grapples with the question of how Puerto Rican women, living in the nation of their colonizer, manifest an identity that exists beyond the scope of colonization. It makes the case for a change in perspective that illustrates the conceptual shift from survivors to thrivers to educators. To do so, it draws upon Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa's theory in the flesh; Iris Lopez's theories of trauma-knowled≥ and María Lugones's concept of 'world travelers' to retain the corporeal flesh and physical location in Latinas' attempts to write subversion under U.S. colonization across racial, cultural, and ethnic boundaries, as well as the gendered-sexuality barriers identified by Emma Pérez. This project builds on their work to frame Latina literature within a new discussion of how corporeal, memory, and sentient experiences of identity must center sentient-flesh as the source of decolonial consciousness rather than relapsing into discourses of the 'body'.
Call Number: PN849 C3 H87x 2019
ISBN: 9783030057305
Publication Date: 2019-06-18
Don't Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking by Adán Medrano; Adán Medrano From an early age, Chef Adán Medrano understood the power of cooking to enthrall, to grant artistic agency, and to solidify identity as well as succor and hospitality. In this second cookbook, he documents and explains native ingredients, traditional techniques, and innovations in casero (home-style) Mexican American cooking in Texas. ?Don?t Count the Tortillas? offers over 100 kitchen-tested recipes, including newly created dishes that illustrate what is trending in homes and restaurants across Texas. Each recipe is followed by clear, step-by-step instructions, explanation of cooking techniques, and description of the dishes? cultural context. Dozens of color photographs round out Chef Medrano?s encompassing of a rich indigenous history that turns on family and, more widely, on community?one bound by shared memories of the art that this book honors.
Call Number: TX715.2 S69 M467x 2019
ISBN: 9781682830390
Publication Date: 2019-06-20
Fantasy island : Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico by Ed Morales A crucial, clear-eyed accounting of Puerto Rico's 122 years as a colony of the US. Since its acquisition by the US in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests. Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.
Call Number: F1976.4 M68x 2019
ISBN: 9781568588995
Publication Date: 2019-09-10
Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity by Paola Ramos Debut author and journalist Paola Ramos travels to near and far corners of the country in search of Latin-X voices that illustrate a growing movement and represent a community of young Latinos that hold more political, social, and cultural relevance today than ever before Latinos are the youngest demographic in the country, with an estimated 32.5 million millennials and Gen Zers across the country. Ten out of six Latinos are millennials or younger and, every single year, one million Latinos turn eighteen. Latin-X- How a New Movement is Changing the Country will take millions of young Latinos-including the author herself-on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment, shedding light on the voices that have been brewing yet overlooked for years. From Afro-Latinos to Trans-Latinos, border town Latinos to the young Cuban-Americans in Miami, this book will give life to the cryptic term 'Latin-X'. Latin-X was a term that originated as a way to be more inclusive towards queer and gender non-confirming members of the larger Latino community. However, over the years, the scope of the term has grown, reflecting a movement that is currently underway across the country- fifty-eight million Latinos are in the midst of rediscovering what their diverse identity means. Today, the "X" is an invitation to any Latino that has ever felt left out of the community. LatinX is a term that seeks to transcend demographics, disrupt stereotypes and create a more cohesive community. This book is also deeply personal to the author, as it is also the first time she will be coming out publicly as a queer Latina. "I am queer, I am Latina, I am Cuban, Mexican and first-generation American," she says, "These are words I have never been ashamed of saying out loud-but there's a difference between passive recognition and really owning one's blood."
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781984899095
Publication Date: 2020-10-20
I Am Diosa: A Journey to Healing Deep, Loving Yourself, and Coming Back Home to Soul by Christine Gutierrez "This raw and relatable guide to radical self-care and self-love empowers readers to embrace the powerful Diosa within.In this fiercely inspiring book from a fresh new voice in the women's empowerment space, psychotherapist Christine Gutierrez welcomes women to join her in healing the wounds from past hurt or trauma to reclaim their worth and come back home to their true self and soul.Diosa is the Spanish word for Goddess. A diosa is anyone who honors the primal feminine energy in the world and within themselves. According to Gutierrez, diosas face obstacles in their lives but are always ready and willing to go to their core to reclaim their inner worth and self-esteem. They are the ones that rise from the ashes and dare to piece themselves back together bone by bone and soul piece by soul piece. From stories of resilience from both Gutierrez and members of her Diosa Tribe, to mantras, meditations, and guided journaling prompts, this book gives women the tools they need to honor their sacred feminine and become who they were always meant to be.I Am Diosa will inspire women to give themselves permission to feel, to be seen, to be heard, and to return to their truest selves."
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 0593086651
Publication Date: 2020
Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism by Laura E. Gómez In an unprecedented demographic shift, Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in just a matter of decades. While their influence shapes everything from electoral politics to popular culture, many Americans still struggle with two basic questions: Who are Latinos, and where do they fit in America's racial order? Laura E. Gomez, a leading expert on race in America, 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.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781595589170
Publication Date: 2020-08-25
Latino Politics in America: Community, Culture, and Interests by John A. Garcia; Gabriel Ramon Sanchez Latino Politics in America discusses what it means to be a Latino American culturally and politically. It provides an in-depth examination of the individual communities that comprise the Latino culture, and how those bonds affect political development and decisions.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781538144060
Publication Date: 2021-03-12
Latinos in American Football: Pathbreakers on the Gridiron, 1927 to the Present by Mario Longoria; Jorge Iber In 1927 Cuban national Ignacio S. Molinet was recruited to play with the Frankford Yellow Jackets of the old NFL for a single season. Mexican national Jose Martinez-Zorrilla achieved 1932 All-American honors. These are the beginnings of the Latino experience in American Football, which continues amidst a remarkable and diversified setting of Hispanic nationalities and ethnic groups. This history of Latinos in American Football dispels the myths that baseball, boxing, and soccer are the chosen and competent sports for Spanish-surname athletes. The book documents their fascination for the sport that initially denied their participation but that could not discourage their determination to master the game.
Call Number: GV939.A1 L663 2020
ISBN: 9781476668864
Publication Date: 2020-02-21
Latinx : The New Force in American Politics and Culture by Ed Morales The Latinx revolution in US culture, society, and politics "Latinx" (pronounced "La-teen-ex") is the gender-neutral term that covers one of the largest and fastest growing minorities in the United States, accounting for 17 percent of the country. Over 58 million Americans belong to the category, including a sizable part of the country's working class, both foreign and native-born. Their political empowerment is altering the balance of forces in a growing number of states. And yet Latinx barely figure in America's ongoing conversation about race and ethnicity. Remarkably, the US census does not even have a racial category for "Latino." In this groundbreaking discussion, Ed Morales explains how Latinx political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje--"mixedness" or "hybridity"--and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding bilingual, bicultural Latin cultures and politics and a challenge to America's infamously black-white racial regime. This searching and long-overdue exploration of the meaning of race in American life reimagines Cornel West's bestselling Race Matters with a unique Latinx inflection.
Call Number: E184 S75 M666 2018
ISBN: 9781784783198
Publication Date: 2018-09-25
Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial by Sarah Jaquette Ray (Editor); Laura Pulido (Foreword by); Stacy Alaimo (Afterword by); Sarah D. Wald (Editor); David J. Vazquez (Editor); Priscilla Solis Ybarra (Editor) The whiteness of mainstream environmentalism often fails to account for the richness and variety of Latinx environmental thought. Building on insights of environmental justice scholarship as well as critical race and ethnic studies, the editors and contributors to Latinx Environmentalisms map the ways Latinx cultural texts integrate environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice. Original interviews with creative writers, including Cherríe Moraga, Helena María Viramontes, and Héctor Tobar, as well as new essays by noted scholars of Latinx literature and culture, show how Latinx authors and cultural producers express environmental concerns in their work. These chapters, which focus on film, visual art, and literature--and engage in fields such as disability studies, animal studies, and queer studies--emphasize the role of racial capitalism in shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world and reveal a vibrant tradition of Latinx decolonial environmentalism.Latinx Environmentalisms accounts for the ways Latinx cultures are environmental, but often do not assume the mantle of "environmentalism."
Call Number: PS153.H56 L45 2019
ISBN: 9781439916667
Publication Date: 2019-11-01
Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion by Ignacio López-Calvo (Editor); Victor Valle (Editor) 2020 International Latino Book Awards Honorable Mention in Best Nonfiction (Multi-Author) Latinx Writing Los Angeles offers a critical anthology of Los Angeles's most significant English-language and Spanish-language (in translation) nonfiction writing from the city's inception to the present. Contemporary Latinx authors, including three Pulitzer Prize winners and writers such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Rubén Martínez, focus on the ways in which Latinx Los Angeles's nonfiction narratives record the progressive racialization and subalternization of Latinxs in the southwestern United States. While notions of racial memory, coloniality, biopolitics, internal colonialism, cultural assimilation, Mexican or pan-Latinx cultural nationalism, and transnationalism permeate this anthology, contributors advocate the idea of a contested modernity that refuses to accept mainstream cultural impositions, proposing instead alternative ways of knowing and understanding. Featuring a wide variety of voices as well as a diversity of subgenres, this collection is the first to illuminate divergent, hybrid Latinx histories and cultures. Redefining Los Angeles's literary history and providing a new model for English, Spanish, and Latinx studies, Latinx Writing Los Angeles is an essential contribution to southwestern and borderland studies.
Call Number: PS508.H57 L45 2018
ISBN: 9781496202413
Publication Date: 2018-04-01
MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-adornment, and Identity Construction by Aída Hurtado (Editor); Norma E. Cantú (Editor) Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, meXicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity.Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region ("Tejana style," "L.A. style"), age group ("homie," "chola"), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceañera market, "walking altars" on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric.
Call Number: E184.M5 M534 2020; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 1477319603
Publication Date: 2020-01-10
A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture by Melissa Castillo Planas A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture explores the cultural and creative lives of the largely young undocumented Mexican population in New York City since September 11, 2001. Inspired by a dialogue between the landmark works of Paul Gilroy and Gloria Anzaldúa, it develops a new analytic framework, the Atlantic Borderlands, which bridges Mexican diasporic experiences in New York City and the black diaspora, not as a comparison but in recognition that colonialism, interracial and interethnic contact through trade, migration, and slavery are connected via capitalist economies and technological developments. This book is based on ten years of fieldwork in  New York City, with members of  a vibrant community of young Mexican migrants who coexist and interact with people from all over the world. It focuses on youth culture including hip hop, graffiti, muralism, labor activism, arts entrepreneurship and collective making.  
Call Number: F128.9.M5 P55 2020; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 1978802315
Publication Date: 2020-03-13
Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature by Trevor Boffone (Editor); Cristina Herrera (Editor); Guadalupe García McCall (Foreword by) The essays in this volume address questions of outsider identities and how these identities are shaped by mainstream myths around Chicanx and Latinx young people, particularly with the common stereotype of the struggling, underachieving inner-city teens. Contributors also grapple with how young adults reclaim what it means to be an outsider, weirdo, nerd, or goth, and how the reclamation of these marginalized identities expand conversations around authenticity and narrow understandings of what constitutes cultural identity. Included are analysis of such texts as I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Shadowshaper, Swimming While Drowning, and others. Addressed in the essays are themes of outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx children's and young adult literature, and the contributors insist that to understand Latinx youth identities it is necessary to shed light on outsiders within an already marginalized ethnic group: nerds, goths, geeks, freaks, and others who might not fit within such Latinx popular cultural paradigms as the chola and cholo, identities that are ever-present in films, television, and the internet.
Call Number: PS153 M4 N48 2020; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781496827463
Publication Date: 2020-03-18
¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence by Diana Taylor In ¡Presente! Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!--present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition--requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles.
Call Number: BD355 T39 2020; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781478009443
Publication Date: 2020-08-14
Public Negotiations : Gender and Journalism in Contemporary US Latina/o Literature by Ariana E. Vigil Ariana E. Vigil's interdisciplinary study, Public Negotiations: Gender and Journalism in Contemporary US Latina/o Literature examines how the boundaries of the Latina/o public sphere are negotiated through mass media.  : Focusing on a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latina/o literary texts that feature Latina/o media figures--works by Lucha Corpi, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Cherríe Moraga, and Rubén Salazar, among others--Vigil examines the relationship between Latina/o media and Latina/o publics and reflects on how literature demonstrates a sustained interest in this relationship. Vigil also reveals how these conversations inevitably engage with gender concerns, showing how the role of gender in this relationship is neither static nor consistent over time. Examining how these works represent such things as gendered Latina/o counter publics, how Central American-American communities are gendered in relation to other US Latina/o communities, how and why gendered expressions of Latinidad are produced and marketed, and how print media provides an important space for dissemination of diverse ideas, Public Negotiations considers the way in which gender functions in terms of both the construction and reception of a Latina/o public in a transnational space. Through thorough examination and with deep insight, Vigil shows how literature can invaluably reflect current and historical issues surrounding media and the public sphere and help us imagine new, hopefully better, possibilities.  
Call Number: PS508.H57 V57 2019
ISBN: 9780814214145
Publication Date: 2019-10-15
Puerto Rico : Independence, Industrial Policy, and Growth by Luis Gautier Puerto Rico is experiencing its deepest economic crisis since the first half of the twentieth century. The unique political and economic relationship between the US and Puerto Rico arguably plays a fundamental role in this crisis. With these in mind and given the imposition of the Financial Oversight Management Board by the US government, this book presents policy recommendations to help Puerto Rico achieve sustainable development. A set of partial equilibrium models are employed to study important industrial policy options and trade issues. This book also discusses the potential role of market-based environmental policies as well as issues of income convergence. The method of analysis to study the Puerto Rico-US relationship presented in this book is entirely new to the literature and the analysis of market-based environmental policy. The overarching result is that it is in the best interest of Puerto Rico and the US to set economic policies consistent with an equilibrium characterized by political independence (i.e., national sovereignty) for Puerto Rico. The potential for sustainable economic growth and development is latent in Puerto Rico's economy. But for factors of production to be used effectively and efficiently, Puerto Rico's economy requires access to international markets at sufficiently lower transaction costs, a condition consistent primarily in an equilibrium characterized by political independence. Access to international markets at sufficiently lower costs would help, inter alia, restore market credibility, regain access to credit markets at bearable costs and achieve important efficiency gains. This book argues that international trade ought to be at the center of development and growth policy. Importantly, it argues on the grounds of efficiency that not only is it in the best interest of the US to help Puerto Rico move gradually towards an equilibrium consistent with political independence, but that a statehood-like equilibrium is inefficient, particularly if a higher degree of access to global markets is at the center of policy formulation. I hope the discussion presented in this book signifies an important contribution to the policy debate in order to address Puerto Rico's economic challenges.
Call Number: HC154.5 G38 2018
ISBN: 1498556833
Publication Date: 2017-12-12
Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities by Rachel Valentina González Quinceañera celebrations, which recognize a girl?s transition to young womanhood at age fifteen, are practiced in Latinx communities throughout the Americas. But in the consumer-driven United States, the ritual has evolved from a largely religious ceremony to an elaborate party where social status takes center stage. Examining the many facets of this contemporary debut experience, Quinceañera Style reports on ethnographic fieldwork in California, Texas, the Midwest, and Mexico City to reveal a complex, compelling story. Along the way, we meet a self-identified transwoman who uses the quinceañera as an intellectual space in her activist performance art. We explore the economic empowerment of women who own barrio boutiques specializing in the quinceañera?s many accessories and made-in-China gowns. And, of course, we meet teens themselves, including a vlogger whose quince-planning tips have made her an online sensation.Disrupting assumptions, such as the belief that Latino communities in the United States can't desire upward mobility without abandoning ethnoracial cultural legacies, Quinceañera Style also underscores the performative nature of class and the process of constructing a self in the public, digital sphere.
Call Number: GT2490 .G66 2019
ISBN: 9781477319680
Publication Date: 2019-11-15
Race and Identity in Hispanic America: the White, the Black, and the Brown by Patricia Reid-Merritt; Michael S. Rodriguez This book offers a historical and comparative overview of the evolution of racial classifications in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The Hispanicization of America is precipitating a paradigm shift in racial thinking in which race is no longer defined by distinct characteristics but rather is becoming synonymous with ethnic/cultural identity. Traditionally, assimilation has been conceived of as a unidirectional and racialized phenomenon. Newly arrived immigrant groups or longstanding minority/indigenous populations were "Americanized" in confining their racial and ethnic natures to the private sphere and adopting, in the public sphere, the cultural mores, norms, and values of the dominant cultural/racial group. In contrast, the Hispanicization of America entails the horizontal assimilation of various groups from Spanish-speaking countries throughout the Western Hemisphere and Caribbean into a pan-ethnic, Hispanic/Latino identity that also challenges the privileged position of whiteness as the primary and exclusive referent for American identity. Instead of focusing on one Hispanic group, ethnic identity, or region, this book chronicles the development of racial identity across the largest Hispanic groups throughout the United States. Highlights distinct differences in perceptions of racial identity for members of the Hispanic community Underscores the fluid and malleable nature of race through a comparative and historical review of the evolution of racial classifications Explains why the Hispanicization of the United States constitutes a paradigm shift from traditional notions of racial identity formation Documents how immigration to the United States from Spanish-speaking countries throughout the Western Hemisphere and Caribbean is creating the first truly Hispanic country by subsuming the national identities of immigrants to the pan-ethnic, Hispanic/Latino category
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781440867859
Publication Date: 2020-04-03
Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV by Frederick Luis Aldama; Christopher González Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. But these cardboard cutouts and examples of lazy storytelling could never embody the rich traditions and histories of Latinx peoples. Not seeing real Latinxs on TV and film reels as kids inspired the authors to dive deep into the world of mainstream television and film to uncover examples of representation, good and bad. The result: a riveting ride through televisual and celluloid reels that make up mainstream culture. As pop culture experts Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González show, the way Latinx peoples have appeared and are still represented in mainstream TV and film narratives is as frustrating as it is illuminating. Stereotypes such as drug lords, petty criminals, buffoons, and sexed-up lovers have filled both small and silver screens--and the minds of the public. Aldama and González blaze new paths through Latinx cultural phenomena that disrupt stereotypes, breathing complexity into real Latinx subjectivities and experiences. In this grand sleuthing sweep of Latinx representation in mainstream TV and film that continues to shape the imagination of U.S. society, these two Latinx pop culture authorities call us all to scholarly action.
Call Number: PN1995.9.H47 A43 2019; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 0816540500
Publication Date: 2019-09-24
The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz; Joshua Chambers-Letson (Editor); Tavia Nyong'o (Editor) The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons--a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781478009979
Publication Date: 2020-10-02
¡Sí, Ella Puede!: The Rhetorical Legacy of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers by Stacey K. Sowards Since the 1950s, Latina activist Dolores Huerta has been a fervent leader and organizer in the struggle for farmworkers? rights within the Latina/o community. A cofounder of the United Farm Workers union in the 1960s alongside César Chávez, Huerta was a union vice president for nearly four decades before starting her own foundation in the early 2000s. She continues to act as a dynamic speaker, passionate lobbyist, and dedicated figure for social and political change, but her crucial contributions and commanding presence have often been overshadowed by those of Chávez and other leaders in the Chicana/o movement. In this new study, Stacey K. Sowards closely examines Huerta?s rhetorical skills both in and out of the public eye and defines Huerta?s vital place within Chicana/o history.Referencing the theoretical works of Pierre Bourdieu, Chela Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, Sowards closely analyzes Huerta?s speeches, letters, and interviews. She shows how Huerta navigates the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, language, and class through the myriad challenges faced by women activists of color. Sowards?s approach to studying Huerta?s rhetorical influence offers a unique perspective for understanding the transformative relationship between agency and social justice.
Call Number: HD6509.H84 S68 2019
ISBN: 9781477317662
Publication Date: 2019-03-01
Soldiers of the Nation : Military Service and Modern Puerto Rico, 1868-1952 by Harry Franqui-Rivera As the island of Puerto Rico transitioned from Spanish to U.S. imperial rule, the military and political mobilization of popular sectors of its society played important roles in the evolution of its national identities and subsequent political choices. While scholars of American imperialism have examined the political, economic, and cultural aspects of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, few have considered the integral role of Puerto Rican men in colonial military service and in helping to consolidate the empire. In Soldiers of the Nation Harry Franqui-Rivera argues that the emergence of strong and complicated Puerto Rican national identities is deeply rooted in the long history of colonial military organizations on the island. Franqui-Rivera examines the patterns of inclusion-exclusion within the military and the various forms of citizenship that are subsequently transformed into socioeconomic and political enfranchisement. Analyzing the armed forces as an agent of cultural homogenization, Franqui-Rivera further explains the formation and evolution of Puerto Rican national identities that eventually led to the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado (the commonwealth) in 1952. Franqui-Rivera concludes that Puerto Rican soldiers were neither cannon fodder for the metropolis nor the pawns of the criollo political elites. Rather, they were men with complex identities who demonstrated a liberal, popular, and broad definition of Puertorriqueñidad.  
Call Number: E183.8.P9 S67 2018
ISBN: 0803278675
Publication Date: 2018-06-01
Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen by Frederick Luis Aldama; William Anthony Nericcio Like two friends sitting down in front of the television together, in Talking #browntv, Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio dialogue about the representations of Latina/os in American television and film from the twentieth century to the present day. One part conversation, one part critique, one part visual cultural studies, and one part rant against the culture industry profiting off warped caricatures of Latina/o subjectivities, Aldama and Nericcio analyze the ways in which Latinx performers have been mediated--with varying degrees of complexity--on the American screen. A comprehensive review of the history of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Hispanics, Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Latinx performers in television and film, Talking #browntv boldly interrogates one of the largest paradoxes in the history of American television: Why are there so few Latina/os on television, and why, when they do appear, are they so often narcos, maids, strumpets, tarts, flakes, and losers?   From the subversive critiques embedded in well-loved children's characters like Speedy Gonzalez to the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in modern-era pornography, from Eva Longoria as ethnic mannequin to J-Lo flipping the sexy Latina music video on its head in "I Luh Ya Papi," and with more than 150 full-color images, Aldama and Nericcio seek to expose the underlying causes as to why Latina/os constitute only 2 percent of mainstream cultural production when they're the majority minority in the US. In a moment when anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant rhetoric oozes from TV sets and medias platform, Talking #browntv emerges as a bold antidote, an eloquent rejoinder, and a thoughtful meditation on Latina/os on the American screen and in America today.
Call Number: PN1992.8 H54 A43 2019
ISBN: 9780814255599
Publication Date: 2019-12-13
Theorizing Folklore from the Margins : Critical and Ethical Approaches by Solimar Otero, ed. The study of folklore has historically focused on the daily life and culture of regular people, such as artisans, storytellers, and craftspeople. But what can folklore reveal about strategies of belonging, survival, and reinvention in moments of crisis? The experience of living in hostile conditions for cultural, social, political, or economic reasons has redefined communities in crisis. The curated works in Theorizing Folklore from the Margins offer clear and feasible suggestions for how to ethically engage in the study of folklore with marginalized populations. By focusing on issues of critical race and ethnic studies, decolonial and antioppressive methodologies, and gender and sexuality studies, contributors employ a wide variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches. In doing so, they reflect the transdisciplinary possibilities of Folklore studies. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, Theorizing Folklore from the Margins confirms that engaging with oppressed communities is not only relevant, but necessary.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9780253056085
Publication Date: 2021-06-15
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * 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. "Karla's book sheds light on people's personal experiences and allows their stories to be told and their voices to be heard."--Selena Gomez FINALIST FOR THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD AWARD * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, BOOK RIOT, LIBRARY JOURNAL, AND TIME 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.    In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited into the federally funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11. In Miami, we enter the ubiquitous botanicas, which offer medicinal herbs and potions to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options. In Flint, Michigan, we learn of demands for state ID in order to receive life-saving clean water. In Connecticut, Cornejo Villavicencio, childless by choice, finds family in two teenage girls whose father is in sanctuary. And through it all we see the author grappling with the biggest questions of love, duty, family, and survival.    In her incandescent, relentlessly probing voice, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio combines sensitive reporting and powerful personal narratives to bring to light remarkable stories of resilience, madness, and death. Through these stories we come to understand what it truly means to be a stray. An expendable. A hero. An American.
Call Number: JV6483 C59 2020
ISBN: 9780399592683
Publication Date: 2020-03-24
Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature by B. V. Olguín "Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature, explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. Drawing upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of violence studies known asviolentologia, which examines the transformation of Colombian society during a century of political and interpersonal violence, this book adapts the neologism "violentology" as a heuristic device and epistemic category to map the salience of violence in Latina/o history, life, and culture in theU.S. and globally.Based on one hundred primary texts and archival documents from an expansive range of Latina/o communities - Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, Salvadoran American, Guatemalan American, and various mixed-heritages and transversal hybridities throughout the world -Violentologies features multiple generations of Latinx combatants, wartime non-combatants, and "peacetime" civilians whose identities and ideologies extend through, and also far beyond, familiar Latinidades. Based on this discrepant archive, Violentologies articulates a contrapuntal assessment ofthe inchoate, contradictory, and complex range of violence-based Latina/o ontologies and epistemologies, and corresponding negotiations of power, or ideologies, pursuant to an expansive and meta-critical Pan-Latina/o methodology and, ultimately, an anti-identitarian Post-Latina/o paradigm."
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9780198863090
Publication Date: 2021-03-05
Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices by Lara Medina (Editor); Martha R. Gonzales (Editor) 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.
Call Number: BL625.7 V65 2019; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 0816540527
Publication Date: 2019-10-08
We Fed an Island : The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time by Jose Andres; Richard Wolffe FOREWORD BY LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA AND LUIS A. MIRANDA, JR. The true story of how a group of chefs fed hundreds of thousands of hungry Americans after Hurricane Maria and touched the hearts of many more Chef José Andrés arrived in Puerto Rico four days after Hurricane Maria ripped through the island. The economy was destroyed and for most people there was no clean water, no food, no power, no gas, and no way to communicate with the outside world. Andrés addressed the humanitarian crisis the only way he knew how: by feeding people, one hot meal at a time. From serving sancocho with his friend José Enrique at Enrique's ravaged restaurant in San Juan to eventually cooking 100,000 meals a day at more than a dozen kitchens across the island, Andrés and his team fed hundreds of thousands of people, including with massive paellas made to serve thousands of people alone.. At the same time, they also confronted a crisis with deep roots, as well as the broken and wasteful system that helps keep some of the biggest charities and NGOs in business. Based on Andrés's insider's take as well as on meetings, messages, and conversations he had while in Puerto Rico, We Fed an Island movingly describes how a network of community kitchens activated real change and tells an extraordinary story of hope in the face of disasters both natural and man-made, offering suggestions for how to address a crisis like this in the future.  Beyond that, a portion of the proceeds from the book will be donated to the Chef Relief Network of World Central Kitchen for efforts in Puerto Rico and beyond.
Call Number: HV555 P9 A53x 2018
ISBN: 0062864483
Publication Date: 2018-09-11
White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing by Jennifer De Leon Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, "What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?" While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn't been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return?to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family's history, and begin to make her own way. Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents' home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 1625345674
Publication Date: 2021-03-26

Here is a short selection of recent Latinx poetry. Use the tabs above to view different book lists. Enjoy!

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Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths by Elizabeth Acevedo A collection of folkloric poems centered on the historical, mythological, gendered, and geographic experiences of a first generation American woman.
Call Number: PS3601 C475 B43x 2016
ISBN: 9781936919451
Publication Date: 2016-10-15
Be Recorder: Poems by Carmen Giménez Smith Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry*Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award* Finalist for theLos Angeles Times Book Prize Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion--against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: "Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us."Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.
Call Number: PS3607 I45215 A6 2019x
ISBN: 9781555978488
Publication Date: 2019-08-06
Boricua en la Luna by Elena M. Aponte A collection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art by Puerto Rican authors on history, family, and the effects of Hurricane Maria. Proceeds from the book benefit hurricane relief on the island.
Call Number: F1976.4 B67x 2019
ISBN: 9781714186259
Publication Date: 2019-12-21
Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico by Urayoán Noel Is poetry an alternative to or an extension of a globalized language? In Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico, poet Urayoán Noel maps the spaces between and across languages, cities, and bodies, creating a hemispheric poetics that is both broadly geopolitical and intimately neurological. In this expansive collection, we hear the noise of cities such as New York, San Juan, and São Paulo abuzz with flickering bodies and the rush of vernaculars as untranslatable as the murmur in the Spanish rumor. Oscillating between baroque textuality and vernacular performance, Noel's bilingual poems experiment with eccentric self-translation, often blurring the line between original and translation as a way to question language hierarchies and allow for translingual experiences. A number of the poems and self-translations here were composed on a smartphone, or else de- and re-composed with a variety of smartphone apps and tools, in an effort to investigate the promise and pitfalls of digital vernaculars. Noel's poetics of performative self-translation operates not only across languages and cultures but also across forms: from the décima and the "staircase sonnet" to the collage, the abecedarian poem, and the performance poem. In its playful and irreverent mash-up of voices and poetic traditions from across the Americas, Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico imagines an alternative to the monolingualism of the U.S. literary and political landscape, and proposes a geo-neuro-political performance attuned to damaged or marginalized forms of knowledge, perception, and identity.
Call Number: PS3614 O39 B89 2015 Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 0816532230
Publication Date: 2015-09-24
Elegía/elegy by Raquel Salas-Rivera Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Bilingual Edition. ELEGÍA/ELEGY is baptized by queer loss and losing. Each section deifies lost cuir/queer loves, closing the distance between deity (queer icon) and fam. The book delves into the (im)possibility of building between lo cuir boricua and the queerness of being boricua in the diaspora. It invites the reader to "learn to tell the difference between our love and theirs," and to see, in this difference, a way forward.
Call Number: PQ7442 S225 E44x 2018
ISBN: 9781939781383
Publication Date: 2019-03-01
Floaters: Poems by Martin Espada Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I'm 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love--even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise.The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl's gently racist question.Whether celebrating the visionaries--the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets--or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father's Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.
Call Number: PS3555 S53 F58 2021
ISBN: 9780393541038
Publication Date: 2021-01-19
I Always Carry My Bones by Felicia M. Zamora The poems in I Always Carry My Bones tackle the complex ideation of home--the place where horrid and beautiful intertwine and carve a being into existence--for marginalized and migrant peoples. Felicia Zamora explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Sometimes we haunt. Sometimes we are the haunted. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty in this country, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging--a belonging inside and outside the flesh. This powerful collection is a message of longing for a sanctuary of self, the dwelling of initial energy needed for the collective fight for human rights.
Call Number: PS3626 A6278 I18 2021
ISBN: 9781609387761
Publication Date: 2021-04-15
LatiNext: The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4 by Felicia Chavez (Editor); Jose Olivarez (Editor); Willie Perdomo (Editor) In the dynamic tradition of the BreakBeat Poets anthology,The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext celebrates the embodied narratives of Latinidad.  Poets speak from an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space.  Like Hip-Hop, we honor what was, what is, and what's next.
Call Number: PS591 H58 L35 2020
ISBN: 9781642591293
Publication Date: 2020-04-07
Lo Terciario / The Tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera Poetry. 2018 National Book Award in Poetry Longlist. Winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Written in response to the PROMESA bill (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) bill, LO TERCIARIO/THE TERCIARY offers a decolonial queer critique and reconsideration of Marx. The book's titles come from Pedro Scaron's El Capital, the 1976 translation of Karl Marx's classic. Published by Siglo Veintiuno Editores, this translation was commonly used by the Puerto Rican left as part of political formation programs. LO TERCIARIO/THE TERCIARY places this text in relation to the Puerto Rican debt crisis, forcing readers to reconsider old questions when facing colonialism's newest horrors.
Call Number: PQ7442 S225 T47x 2018
ISBN: 9781937421274
Publication Date: 2018-04-14
Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor by Norma Elia Cantú This collection is a beautifully crafted exploration of life in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Written by Norma Elia Cantú, the award-winning author of Canícula, this collection carries the perspective of a powerful force in Chicana literature--and literature worldwide. The poems are a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa's foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands. Poems addressed to talented and influential women such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Adrienne Rich, among others, pour gratitude and recognition into the collection. While many of the poems in Meditación Fronteriza are gentle and inviting, there are also moments that grieve for the state of the borderlands, calling for political resistance.
Call Number: PS3553.A555 A6 2019; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 0816540470
Publication Date: 2019-09-24
Of Form and Gather: Poems by Felicia Zamora Of Form & Gather marks the dazzling debut of Felicia Zamora, whose poems concern themselves with probing questions, not facile answers. Where does the self reside? What forms do we, as human beings, inhabit as we experience the world around us? Echoing the collection's provocative title, final judge Edwin Torres writes: "Zamora has crafted a work that celebrates form as human evolution--the poem's breath, the poet's body--passing over time in a landscape thirsty for passage." Privileging journey over destination, Zamora's poems spur the reader to immerse herself in linguistic soundscapes where the physicality of the poems themselves is, in no small part, the point: poems that challenge us to navigate the word/world as both humans and things. Edwin Torres continues: "This is quietly revolutionary work. . . . A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement." With the publication of this volume, the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, now in its seventh edition, emphatically makes good on its aim to nurture the various paths that Latino/a poetry is taking in the twenty-first century.
Call Number: PS3626 A6278 A6 2017 Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 9780268101787
Publication Date: 2017-02-28
The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat by Nancy Kang; Silvio Torres-Saillant The Once and Future Muse presents the first major study of the life and work of Dominican-born bilingual American poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932). Beginning with her literary celebrity as the youngest poet ever inducted into the Poetry Society of America, it traces her relative obscurity after 1952 when she married and took on family and employment responsibilities, to her triumphant return to the poetry spotlight decades later when she reclaimed her former prestige with a series of award-winning poetry collections. The authors define Espaillat's place in American letters with attention to her formalist aesthetics, Hispanic Caribbean immigrant background, poetic community building, bilingual ethos, and domestically minded woman-of-color feminism. Addressing the temporality of her oeuvre--her publishing before and after the splitting of American literature into distinct ethnic segments--this work also highlights the demands that the social transformations of the 1960s placed on literary artists, critics, and readers alike.
Call Number: PS3555 S535 Z73x 2018 Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 0822965429
Publication Date: 2018-05-11
Other Musics: New Latina Poetry by Cynthia Cruz (Editor) Latina poets occupy an important place in today's literary landscape. Coming from diverse backgrounds, they share an understanding of what it means to exist within the margins of society. As artists, they possess a dedication to their craft and a commitment to experimentation. Their voices--sometimes lyrical, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes politically charged--are distinctly female. Whereas previous anthologies have merged the works of Latino and Latina poets, this collection is the first to showcase Latina poetry on its own terms. For years readers have admired the poetry of prominent Latina authors Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros. Building on their inspirational legacy, Other Musics heralds a new generation of Latina poets whose work blends traditional forms and styles with postmodern innovations. These poets do not fit neatly into one category. They come from all walks of life, from remarkably varied class, ethnic, occupational, and educational backgrounds. Their topics and concerns are wide-ranging. All of the poets, according to volume editor Cynthia Cruz, are creating "a new kind of music," one that embraces the "in-between" and bicultural world that Latina women must constantly straddle. The fifteen poets featured in this anthology are Desirée Alvarez, Karen Bradway, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Diana Maria Delgado, Natalie Diaz, Carolina Ebeid, Sandy Florian, Carrie Fountain, Leticia Hernández-Linares, Ada Limón, Sheryl Luna, Kristin Naca, Deborah Paredez, Emmy Pérez, and Carmen Giménez Smith. Along with an ample selection of each of their poetry, Other Musics features an artist statement by each poet, in which she discusses her work, her writing practice, how she became a writer, and her views on the purpose and mission of poetry in the contemporary world.
Call Number: PS591.H58 O84 2019
ISBN: 9780806162881
Publication Date: 2019-04-25
Peluda by Melissa Lozada-Oliva One of the most original performance poets of her generation, Melissa Lozada-Oliva has captivated crowds across the country and online with her vivid narratives. Humorous and biting, personal and communal, self-deprecating and unapologetically self-loving, peluda (meaning hairy or hairy beast) is the poet at her best. The book explores the relationship between femininity and body hair as well as the intersections of family, class, the immigrant experience, Latina identity, and much more, all through Lozada-Oliva's unique lens and striking voice.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781943735242
Publication Date: 2017
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz's highly anticipated follow-up toWhen My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award 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.
Call Number: PS3604 I186 A6 2020x
ISBN: 9781644450147
Publication Date: 2020-03-03
Tracing the Horse: Poems by Diana Marie Delgado Set in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, Diana Marie Delgado's debut poetry collection follows the coming-of-age of a young Mexican-American woman trying to make sense of who she is amidst a family and community weighted by violence and addiction. With bracing vulnerability, the collection chronicles the effects of her father's drug use and her brother's incarceration, asking the reader to consider reclamation and the power of the self.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 194268388X
Publication Date: 2019-05-01
Transversal: Poems by Urayoán Noel Transversal takes a  disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics. Featuring Noel's bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel's experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. This collection explores walking poems improvised on a smartphone, as well as remixed classical and experimental forms. Poems are presented in interlocking bilingual versions that complicate the relationship between translation and original, and between English and Spanish as languages of empire and popular struggle. The book creatively examines translation and its simultaneous urgency and impossibility in a time of global crisis. Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 0816542996
Publication Date: 2021-03-16
When Love Was Reels: Poetry by José B. González "My parents crossed when I started losing / teeth. My memory of them is broken, chipped / away." Expressing his longing not to be forgotten like so many abandoned children in his native country, José B. González writes about a young boy's life in this moving collection of narrative poems that uses iconic Latin American and Latino films as a guiding motif.In each poem, famous movie and TV scenes featuring icons likes Pedro Infante and Cantinflas and modern stars such as Elizabeth Peña, Edward James Olmos and Esai Morales are juxtaposed with important moments in the boy's life. In the first section, "Scenes from the Golden Age," the boy watches classic Latin American films from the '30s, '40s and '50s at the cinema with his grandmother in El Salvador. In a 1948 film, he notes the difference between a maid, who "stands straight like the board on which she irons the family's clothes," and his grandmother, who "drags each leg like a broken broom," her shoulders "heavy, like a stack of irons." He imagines how once she must have been strong, raising her son, urging him to resist "the hungry promises of dreams."In the second section, "Scenes from El Norte," he moves to New York, "where the screens / will not be black and white." There his uncle leaves him in the apartment to watch TV and learn English. The boy writes to his grandmother, but doesn't tell her "how / I swallow my screams / how I watch alone." Later, he and his friends use spray cans to tag Brooklyn buildings, and that paint saves them, keeping them "from / believing / in blades, / guns and / knives." Providing a tribute as well as a criticism of the way that film and television portray Latino lives, the collection is also notable for shedding light on the lives of so many youth raised by grandmothers in Latin America as the generation in-between went in search of the American Dream. These poems hauntingly illuminate Salvadoran immigration to the United States.
Call Number: Available as an ebook
ISBN: 9781558858503
Publication Date: 2017-09-30
While They Sleep (Under the Bed Is Another Country) by Raquel Salas Rivera Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. WHILE THEY SLEEP (UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY) refuses to sweep up the shards of Hurricane María's aftermath. Written in dialogic fragments and interspersed with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma, it is arranged around the two different discourses. The bed on which America sleeps, and which America has made, is built on the fear that the nations it has oppressed will rise up against it, a monstrous shadow in a child's nightmare. Written in English, WHILE THEY SLEEP points to an imperialist American identity: the dormant body of the text. Answering in Spanish, UNDER THE BED is another country is the footnote, the monster under the bed, the colony: Puerto Rico.
Call Number: PQ7442 S25 W49x 2019
ISBN: 9780991429844
Publication Date: 2019-06-04
Wonderful Wasteland and Other Natural Disasters: Poems by Elidio La Torre Lagares When Hurricane María unleashed its devastation onto Puerto Rico, thousands of lives were lost to the storm in what was the island's worst natural disaster on record. With so much of the recovery still underway and the scars still fresh, its citizens continue to contend with the reality that life on the island has fundamentally changed. In his first collection of poems written in English, La Torre Lagares journeys through his memory in an effort to recompose his shattered land. Together, these poems form a poignant, personal account of a man facing the tragic destinies of his family and his country in the aftermath of a natural disaster. For example, the deaths of the mother and the father are resignified as the death of the poet's personal relationship, which at the same time evokes the rupture between individuals and their sense of place. Drawing from both American and Latin American poetry, as well as global influences, to articulate a language of loss and devastation in search of a new identity, this collection illuminates a chaotic and confusing landscape that is not only physical but also cultural, social, and political. Taken together, this work serves as a stirring reminder of the dislocation and fractured attachment that speaks to many Americans, including transnationals and immigrants. Ultimately it speaks to coping with physical loss and emotional pain in the face of human adversity.
Call Number: PS3612 A2445 A6 2019x; Also available as an ebook
ISBN: 0813178223
Publication Date: 2019-09-30

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