Lists
by Powell's Staff, October 5, 2023 11:14 AM
In celebration of this year’s Hispanic and Latine Heritage Month, we’re excited to recommend nine (relatively) new nonfiction releases that we’re sure you’ll love. This list is filled with vital, polyphonic stories about love and community, colonialism and migration, ancestral history and Latine identity, land and movement, memory and loss. Looking for more? Check out our resource page for displays, lists, and essays.
by Erika L. Sánchez
“Women’s pain has always been oversimplified and disregarded. What is not understood is conveniently assigned to the ethereal.”
An utterly original memoir (in essay form) that’s as deeply moving as it is hilarious. Sánchez writes about everything, from sex to white feminism to depression, realign an interior life rich with details, ideas, perception! — Hana H.
by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
“Healing was found in stretching toward abundance. It was not about leaving the past behind, dividing the self into good and bad, but about opening a path through ruins.”
This is a mesmerizing memoir of ancestral history. Descended from a family of curanderos (healers) and spiritual mediums, Ingrid Rojas Contreras reflects on her Colombian upbringing. — Antonia S.
by Héctor Tobar
“In the class structure of this country, the role of Latino people is to build the movie set of white perfection again and again.”
Our Migrant Souls is a thought-provoking, incisive look at what it means to be Latinx, from novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Héctor Tobar. Tobar's lens here is wide sweeping: he looks at racist narratives in pop culture; he travels across the country and explores Latinx enclaves in otherwise white communities; he writes about his own experience as a son of Guatemalan immigrants. Throughout it all, he takes on capitalism, the construction of race, colonialism, and what it means to be a member of a community that is still consistently othered. Our Migrant Souls is an incredibly important new book. — Kelsey F.
by Myriam Gurba
“It’s easy to get sucked into playing morbid games. When I was little, I happily went along with a few.”
This "informal sociology of creeps" from Myriam Gurba — the widely praised author of the coming-of-age memoir Mean and the internet's (and my) favorite review of American Dirt — is whip-smart, unflinching, and wryly funny. — Tove H.
by Alejandra Oliva
“If you’ve experienced deep grief, if you’ve lived through any kind of event with an aftermath, you know the way that time fractures and splinters, the way true things take on the sheen of unreality while dreams feel vivid and visceral.”
Alejandra Oliva’s Rivermouth is a compelling and beautifully written memoir about Oliva’s work interpreting at the US-Mexico border, her family’s historical relationship to the border, and the deep, fractious meaning of having this idea of a border that serves as a “porous” barrier. A look at trauma, at land and place and belonging. &mdash Kelsey F.
by John Paul Brammer
“The worst things that have ever happened to us don’t define us. We are the ones who get to define what those things mean.”
In Hola Papi, John Paul Brammer doles out advice for a primarily gay audience through personal anecdotes and memories. Brammer is the “Chicano Carrie Bradshaw” of a young, queer generation. Hola Papi contains twelve essays, each framed as an advice column in response to a question such as how to cope with childhood trauma. Brammer balances humor with compassion in this modern commentary on identity, Mexican American culture, and tradition. — Antonia S.
by Emilly Prado
“At the funeral, I will dig a hole into the foundation and drop each letter of my old name, one by one. I will stir the dirt with the remains of tree roots and say a prayer for us all — for old time’s sakes.”
Prado’s collection coagulates memory, essay, and confessional in this intimate snapshot of a second-generation Chicana coming of age, with all that’s gained and lost along the way. — Sitara G.
by Efrén C. Olivares
"It was as if the time when a person migrates across a border creates a sort of moral legitimacy over membership in a community, and those who come later can no longer join on the same terms."
A brutal and galvanizing testimony to the humanitarian failure of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy and discriminatory immigration practice in the US, particularly in regards to the care and custody of children forcibly and often illegally taken from their families. — Sitara G.
by Raquel Gutiérrez
"Our historical imprints enhance the value of a neighborhood. Our histories sell, whereas our lives obstruct profits."
Brown Neon is a stunning debut essay collection from Tucson-based art critic, poet, and educator Raquel Gutiérrez. The book is divided into three sections — love and kin, land and movement, and art and labor. Encounters in Los Angeles and the Southwest with aging punks, lesbian legends, and border activists lead to thoughtful explorations of Latine identity, cultural resistance, and art. Gutiérrez writes, “I am a brown neon sign: aimless aging homosexual hipster.” — Antonia S.
÷ ÷ ÷
Find more reading recommendations, original author content, and bookseller displays on our Hispanic and Latine Heritage Month resource page.
|