In celebration of Latinx Heritage Month, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite books written by Latinz authors. Tweet us @curatormagazine and tell us your favorites.
Drink Cultura by José Antonio Burciaga
Reading Burciaga’s essay collection feels like finally talking to someone who understands exactly what it’s like to feel as if you do not belong entirely—someone who understands what it means to live in, between, and outside of two cultures. His humor, wit, and way of navigating political and cultural barriers are the reason I’ve read and reread. Burciaga writes about what it means for young Chicanos to be tied to Mexico, to lose our ties to the motherland as our family members pass away, and how we hold on to tradition and custom and language in a country that begs us to lose it. His words are the “soul of a young Chicano who sought the truth in his own reflection.”
Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border by Octavio Solis
A renowned playwright, Solis’ parents immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the late 1950s, while pregnant with their firstborn, Octavio, to make a life in El Paso, Texas. This essay collection tells the stories of Solis’ childhood, which to him resemble the religious Mexican folk art known as retablos, tin paintings “in which a dire event is depicted–an accident, a crime, an illness, a calamity, some terrible rift in a person’s life, which they survive thanks to the intercession of the Divine.” Though no longer religious, Catholicism haunts Solis’ essays, which remind me of Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood–and in fact, Solis’ childhood was every bit as American as Dillard’s, though lived through the eyes of “that skinny brown kid riding his bike out there in the desert…” This is one to reread when you need to forget politics and remember the humans behind the policies.
The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade
I haven’t been this captivated by a novel in quite some time. Set in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. His focus and fervor for the role is disrupted when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep. Angel’s arrival is most inconvenient, running all Amadeo’s plans for personal redemption. Quade writes rich characters you grow to love, even when they make cringe-worthy mistakes. These characters are learning, like us, how to love each other and how to be a real family.
The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz
After telling my mother I wanted to read more from writers who shared our identity, she put a copy of El Laberinto de la Soledad on my desk. The Nobel Prize winning Mexican poet and critic writes to explore Mexican existence, culture, and history. Paz guides his readers through the conquest of Mexico, death and celebration.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
A Chicana cultural theorist and native Texan, Anzaldúa writes about growing up near the US-Mexico border, the migrant workers she knew and the value of the Spanish language in her collection of essays and poetry. She wrestles with identity and the feeling of longing for a home that does not exist. Anzaldúa asks her readers to think of borderlands as not just the physical, political, national line, but to also consider that a borderland is the space that we travel when we try to live between two worlds, but not just two worlds rather the multiple worlds that might complicate our identity—race, class, gender, sexuality, religion.
“What I’ve Learned” by Aja Monet
A Cuban-Jamaican spoken word poet, Monet’s works blend disciplines–film, music, and poetry–into a sort of new impressionism. Her “moving visual poems” contain the energy of the Harlem Renaissance as you sway along to the resonances of her voice and the jazz riff that accompanies her and the blurred images that rush by that cause you to feel as if you’ve boarded the subway and sat next to her. Her words will make you feel something and will inspire you to create in response.
Los Lobos is a national treasure, the band from East L.A. that’s been together since the 70s maybe the truest of American bands, certainly one of the best live acts to ever grace this nation’s stages. Los Lobos’ music spans rockabilly, roots music, Mexican folk, children’s songs, and art rock. Live, their two- and sometimes three-guitar attack extends into sublime, lyrical improvisation. The best place to begin is to head to your local streaming service and click on the “Best of” or “Essential” playlists. Album-wise, you can start with By the Light of the Moon, the band’s excellent third release.