Celebrating Latine Heritage Month

Summary:

Cambridge, 2018. Ana and Luis's relationship is on the rocks, despite their many similarities, including their mothers who both fled El Salvador during the war. In her search for answers, and against her best judgement, Ana uses The Defractor, an experimental device that allows users to peek into alternate versions of their lives. What she sees leads her and Luis on a quest through Havana and San Salvador to uncover the family histories they are desperate to know, eager to learn if what might have been could fix what is. Havana, 1978. The Salvadoran war is brewing, and Neto, a young revolutionary with a knack for forging government papers, meets Rafael at a meeting for the People's Revolutionary Army. The two form an intense and forbidden love, shedding their fake names and revealing themselves to each other inside the covert world of their activism. When their work separates them, they begin to exchange weekly letters, but soon, as the devastating war rages on, forces beyond their control threaten to pull them apart forever. Ruben Reyes Jr.'s debut novel is an epic, genre-bending journey through inverted worlds-one where war ends with a peace treaty, and one where it ends with a decisive victory by the Salvadoran government. What unfolds is a stunning story of displacement and belonging, of loss and love. It's both a daring imagining of what might have been and a powerful reckoning of our past-- Provided by publisher.

Summary:

Catalina is trying to work out her own life as she leaves her undocumented family behind to enter Harvard. Suffering from bouts of PTSD, she struggles to connect to her new world just as she struggled to make sense of her old one. She infiltrates the subcultures of elite undergrads-internships and college newspapers, parties and secret societies-and observes them like an anthropologist, but then falls in love, or something like love, with a fellow student, an actual anthropology scholar who wants to teach her about the Andean world she was born in but never knew. They are drawn to each other by the strange attraction of exocticized fascination-she, a real live Latin American, becomes a subject of academic interest; he, in turns, draws her fascination as a white legacy admit born into the strange world she now navigates. Catalina is uncertain: should she let herself become what he wants her to be and take up residence in his secure and privileged world? Or should she return to the life she's known, with all its thorny precarity? Who is she anyway?--

Summary:

Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment--a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she's now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she's still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her. In these essays, Sánchez writes about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression, revealing an interior life rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez at her best--a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend--

Summary:

In Cuba, the passing of Fidel Castro from this world and of Raúl Castro from power have raised urgent questions about the island's political future. In the United States, Barack Obama's opening to Cuba, the reversal of that policy during Donald Trump's administration, and Joseph Biden's apparent willingness to reinitiate open relations have made the nature of the historic relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. In both countries, the time is ripe for a new reckoning with Cuba's history and its relationship to the United States. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an ambitious and moving chronicle of more than five hundred years of Cuban history, reconceived and written for a moment when history itself seems up for grabs. Starting on the eve of the arrival of Columbus and ending with the 2020 US presidential election, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of modern Cuba, with its dramatic history of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Throughout, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between Cuba and its neighbor to the north, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways Cuba has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This, then, is a story of Cuba that will also give American readers unexpected insights into the history of their own country. Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on over thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States-as well as the author's own extensive travel in Cuba over the same period-this is a stunning and monumental history of Cuba like no other--Provided by publisher.

Summary:

An award-winning journalist's deeply reported exploration of how race, identity, and political trauma have influenced the rise of far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics. Democrats have historically assumed they can rely on the Latino vote, but recent elections have called that loyalty into question. In fact, despite his vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric and disastrous border policies, Donald Trump won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Now, journalist Paola Ramos pulls back the curtain on these voters, traveling around the country to uncover what motivates them to vote for and support issues that seem so at odds with their self-interest. From coast to coast, from cities to rural towns, Defectors introduces readers to underdog GOP candidates, January 6th insurrectionists, evangelical pastors, and culture war crusaders, aiming to identify the influences at the heart of this rightward shift. Through their stories, Ramos shows how tribalism, traditionalism, and political trauma within the Latino community have been weaponized to radicalize and convert voters, who, like many of their white counterparts, are fearful of losing their place in American society. We meet Monica De La Cruz, a Republican congresswoman from the Rio Grande Valley who won on a platform promising to finish what Trump started and pushing the Great Replacement theory; Daniel Ortiz, a Mexican man who refers to himself as a Spaniard and opposed the removal of a statue of a Spanish conquistador in New Mexico; Luis Cabrera, an evangelical pastor pushing to Make America Godly Again; Anthony Aguero, an independent journalist turned border vigilante; and countless other individuals and communities who make up the rising conservative Latino population. Cross-cultural and assiduously reported, Defectors highlights how one of America's most powerful and misunderstood electorates may come to define the future of American politics. --

Summary:

A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant’s complex relationships with his mother and his motherland

In this groundbreaking novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez plunges us into the heart of one boy’s life. His mother takes him and his brother from Colombia to America, leaving their absent father behind but essentially disappearing herself once they get to Miami. In America, his mother works as a waitress when she was once a doctor. The boy embraces his queer identity as wholeheartedly as he embraces his new home, but not without a sense of loss. As he grows, his relationship with his mother becomes fraught, tangled, a love so intense that it borders on vivid pain but is also the axis around which his every decision revolves. She may have once forgotten him, disappeared, but she is always on his mind. He moves to New York, ducking in and out of bed with different men as he seeks out something, someone, to make him whole again. When his mother invites him to visit family in Colombia with her, he returns to the country as a young man, trying to find peace with his father, with his homeland, with who he’s become since he left, and with who his mother finally we come to know her and her secrets, her complex ambivalence and fierce love.

Hombrecito— “little man”—is a moving portrait of a young person between cultures, between different ideas of himself. From an extraordinary new talent, this is a story told with startling beauty and intensity, a story for anyone searching for home, searching for a way to love.

Summary:

The poems in Jailbreak of Sparrows reveal the ways in which the ordinary becomes monumental: family portraits, politically charged reports, and tributes to the unsung. Espada’s focus ranges from the bombardment of his family’s hometown in Puerto Rico amid an anti-colonial uprising to the murder of a Mexican man by police in California, from the poet’s adolescent brawl on a basketball court over martyred baseball hero Roberto Clemente to his unorthodox methods of representing undocumented migrants as a tenant lawyer. We also encounter 'love songs' to the poet’s wife from a series of unexpected voices: a bat with vertigo, the polar bear mascot for a minor league ballclub, a disembodied head in a jar. Jailbreak of Sparrows is a collection of arresting poems that roots itself in the image, the musicality of language, and the depth of human experience. 'Look at this was all he said, and all he had to say' the poet says about his father, a photographer who documented his Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn and beyond. The poems of Martín Espada tell us: Look.--

Summary:

Juliet Milagros Palante is leaving the Bronx and headed to Portland, Oregon. She just came out to her family and isn't sure if her mom will ever speak to her again. But Juliet has a plan, sort of, one that's going to help her figure out this whole Puerto Rican lesbian thing. She's interning with the author of her favorite book: Harlowe Brisbane, the ultimate authority on feminism, women's bodies, and other gay-sounding stuff. Will Juliet be able to figure out her life over the course of one magical summer? Is that even possible? Or is she running away from all the problems that seem too big to handle? With more questions than answers, Juliet takes on Portland, Harlowe, and most importantly, herself.

Summary:

The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which Steven Espada Dawson contemplates belonging, identity, and grief in poems about his half-immigrant Mexican American family: his dying mother who raised him, his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade, and his absent father. What does it mean to be a family of one--to be orphaned, whether by fate or by circumstance? In language that is both grounded and ethereal, Dawson tallies the losses and looks at what remains: the frustration and anger, the bewilderment and sadness--and the affection and humor that make themselves felt in spite of everything--Page 4 of cover.

Summary:

From award-winning poet Vanessa Angélica Villarreal comes a brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by the forces of migration and colonialism. In Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal offers us an intimate mosaic of migration, violence, and colonial erasure through the lens of her marriage and her experiences navigating American monoculture. As she attempts to recover the truth from the absences and silences within her life, her relationships, and those of her ancestors, Vanessa pieces together her story from the fragments of music, memory, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all. The trauma of remembering gives the collection its unique structure: Each chapter is an attempt to reimagine and re-world what has been lost. In one essay, Vanessa examines the gender performativity of Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can provide healing when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember--her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce--and finds a new way to archive her history and map her future(s), one infused with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking. By engaging readers in her project of rebuilding narrative, Vanessa broadens our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be. Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories--

Summary:

At la Playita del Condado in Puerto Rico, Meli meets a crab, Jaiba, who takes her on a dreamlike underwater adventure, teaches her about the importance of shark conservation, and reveals Meli's ultimate destiny--to become the Mother of Sharks.

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For an undocumented immigrant, what is the true cost of the American dream? Julissa Arce shares her story in a riveting memoir. When she was 11 years old Julissa Arce left Mexico and came to the United States on a tourist visa to be reunited with her parents, who dreamed the journey would secure her a better life. When her visa expired at the age of 15, she became an undocumented immigrant. Thus began her underground existence, a decades long game of cat and mouse, tremendous family sacrifice, and fear of exposure. After the Texas Dream Act made a college degree possible, Julissa's top grades and leadership positions landed her an internship at Goldman Sachs, which led to a full time position--one of the most coveted jobs on Wall Street. Soon she was a vice president, a rare Hispanic woman in a sea of suits and ties, yet still guarding her 'underground' secret. In telling her personal story of separation, grief, and ultimate redemption, Arce shifts the immigrant conversation, and changes the perception of what it means to be an undocumented immigrant--

Summary:

Every night, tiny stars appear out of the darkness in little Sandy's bedroom. She catches them and creates wonderful creatures to play with until she falls asleep, and in the morning brings them back to life in the whimsical drawings. When a mysterious new girl appears at school, Sandy's drawings are noticed for the first time, but Morfie's fascination with Sandy's talent soon turns into something far more sinister.

Summary:

In Our Migrant Souls, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now. “Latino” is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States, and also one of the most rapidly growing. Composed as a direct address to the young people who identify or have been classified as “Latino,” Our Migrant Souls is the first account of the historical and social forces that define Latino identity. Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, and pop culture, Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of “Latino” as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and gives voice to the anger and the hopes of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes and who have faced insult and division―a story as old as this country itself. Tobar translates his experience as not only a journalist and novelist but also a mentor, a leader, and an educator. He interweaves his own story, and that of his parents’ migration to the United States from Guatemala, into his account of his journey across the country to uncover something expansive, inspiring, true, and alive about the meaning of “Latino” in the twenty-first century--Publisher's description

Summary:

Almost 10 years before Brown vs. Board of Education, Sylvia Mendez and her parents helped end school segregation in California. An American citizen of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage who spoke and wrote perfect English, Mendez was denied enrollment to a Whites only school. Her parents took action by organizing the Hispanic community and filing a lawsuit in federal district court. Their success eventually brought an end to the era of segregated education in California.

Summary:

"When Javier Zamora was nine, he traveled unaccompanied by bus, boat, and foot from El Salvador to the United States to reunite with his parents. This is his memoir of that dangerous journey, a nine-week odyssey that nearly ended in calamity on multiple occasions. It's a miracle that Javier survived the crossing and a miracle that he has the talent to now tell his story so masterfully. While Solito is Javier's story, it's also the story of millions of others who have risked so much to come to this country. A memoir that reads like a novel, rooted in precise and authentic detail, Solito is destined to be a classic of the immigration experience"--Provided by publisher.

Summary:

'Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.' That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva--stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that's why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales. In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay's most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances. As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay's manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch. Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved--

Summary:

Vida is a curandera, a local healer, who has been called to the resort to attend to a crisis. A young guest lies unconscious due to negligent resort childcare. Vida wants nothing to do with it, as she has her own unborn child to think about. Laura, a mid-level manager at the Grand Paloma Resort, is forced to call Vida for help. She's made it this far through sheer hard work. Her brainchild, which pairs platinum guests with a resort employee to attend to their every need, has been wildly successful. She's mere weeks away from a promotion that will blaze a path off the resort, to a life of freedom and opportunity. If only her little sister, Elena, could get with the program. Elena has tried her best to live up to her own ideals and her sister's expectations; to escape the endless monotony of her life, she's become increasingly dependent on pills and partying. As a babysitter at the resort, she's at the mercy of guests who are only interested in having fun, cheating on each other, and getting a break from their screen-addicted kids. Now one of those kids is believed to be dead and it's all her fault. At a local beachfront watering hole, Elena runs into the child's father. High and clueless, he offers her an obscene amount of money to give him private time with two young local girls. Elena pockets the cash and prays she's gotten the girls out of harm's way--until they disappear.

Summary:

Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In this volume, Nuila follows the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care. Each patient eventually lands at Ben Taub, the county hospital where Dr. Nuila has worked for over a decade. Nuila delves with empathy into the experiences of his patients, braiding their dramas into a singular narrative that contradicts the established idea that the only way to receive good healthcare is with good insurance. As readers follow twists and turns in each patient's story, it's impossible to deny that our system is broken--and that Ben Taub's innovative model, which emphasizes people over payments, could help light the path forward. --

Summary:

A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador's brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren't yet done telling their stories. El Salvador, 1923. Graciela grows up on a volcano in a community of indigenous women indentured to coffee plantations owned by the country's wealthiest, until a messenger from the Capital comes to claim her: at nine years old she's been chosen to be an oracle for a rising dictator--a sinister, violent man wedded to the occult. She'll help foresee the future of the country. In the Capital she meets Consuelo, the sister she's never known, stolen away from their home before Graciela was born. The two are a small fortress within the dictator's regime, but they're no match for El Gran Pendejo's cruelty. Years pass and terror rises as the economy flatlines, and Graciela comes to understand the horrific vision that she's unwittingly helped shape just as genocide strikes the community that raised her. She and Consuelo barely escape, each believing the other to be dead. They run, crossing the globe, reinventing their lives, and ultimately reconnecting at the least likely moment. Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts, through the stories of these sisters and the ghosts they carry with them, a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations--

Summary:

Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart. Constantly surprising, joyously sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love--an unexpected gift from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.--