- Hispanic Star "a platform to advance Hispanics in the U.S. Hispanics are positive contributors to the U.S. They mean economic growth and are shaping the culture."
- Latinx History Project "documents and preserves our community's history, and educates the public on the rich identities and societal contributions of the Latinx LGBTQ community to promote tolerance and acceptance. Now more than ever, our mission and work is critical to our community's survival!"
- National Hispanic Heritage Month This Web portal is a collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
Fiction Books
Out of Darkness by
"London, Texas. 1937. Naomi Vargas and Wash Fuller know about the lines in East Texas as well as anyone. They know the signs that mark them. They know the people who enforce them. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive. (Set during the 1937 New London school explosion, the deadliest school disaster in American history.)."
Miss Del Río by
"Spirited away to Hollywood from Mexico City, Dolores del Río becomes an instant star, swept up into Tinseltown's glitzy inner circle, until, amidst her tumultuous personal life, she becomes box office poison amid growing prejudice before World War II, forcing her to decide what price she's willing to pay to achieve her dreams"-- Provided by publisher.1910, Mexico. The country’s revolution spreads. Dolores, daughter of a wealthy banker, must flee her comfortable life in Durango or risk death. Her family settles in Mexico City; she marries Jaime del Río. At a party she meets an influential American director who recognizes in her a natural performer. He invites her to Hollywood, and practically overnight, the famous Miss del Río is born. Swept up in Tinseltown’s glitzy inner circle, she takes her place among film royalty, but her personal life becomes increasingly complicated. When she’s labeled box office poison amid growing prejudice before WWII, Dolores must decide what price she’s willing to pay to achieve her dreams. -- adapted from jacket
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by
"The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen year old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman's hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time? The years since Ruthy's disappearance haven't been easy on the Ramirez family. It's 2008, and their mother, Dolores, still struggles with the loss, Jessica juggles a newborn baby with her hospital job, and Nina, after four successful years at college, has returned home to medical school rejections and is forced to work in the mall folding tiny bedazzled thongs at the lingerie store. After seeing maybe Ruthy on their screen, Jessica and Nina hatch a plan to drive to where the show is filmed in search of their long lost sister. When Dolores catches wind of their scheme, she insists on joining, along with her pot-stirring holy roller best friend, Irene. What follows is a family road trip and reckoning that will force the Ramirez women to finally face the past and look toward a future-with or without Ruthy in it. What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love"-- Provided by publisher.
Frizzy by
"Marlene loves three things: art, her cool tía Ruby and hanging out with her best friend, Camila. But according to her mother, Paola, the only things she needs to focus on are school and growing up. That means straightening her hair every weekend so she can have "presentable," "good" hair. But Marlene hates being in the salon and doesn't understand why her curls are not considered pretty by those around her. With a few hiccups, a dash of embarrassment, and the much-needed help of Camila and Tía Ruby - she slowly starts a journey to learn to appreciate and proudly wear her curly hair" -- Page 4 of cover.
Sabrina and Corina by
powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands. Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado - a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite - these women navigate the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force. In "Sugar Babies," ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. "Any Further West" follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In "Tomi," a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, "Sabrina & Corina," a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual. Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home. -- From dust jacket.
Merci Suárez Changes Gears by
"Merci Suárez knew that sixth grade would be different, but she had no idea just how different. For starters, Merci has never been like the other kids at her private school in Florida, because she and her older brother, Roli, are scholarship students. They don't have a big house or a fancy boat, and they have to do extra community service to make up for their free tuition. So when bossy Edna Santos sets her sights on the new boy who happens to be Merci's school-assigned Sunshine Buddy, Merci becomes the target of Edna's jealousy. Things aren't going well at home, either: Merci's grandfather and most trusted ally, Lolo, has been acting strangely lately -- forgetting important things, falling from his bike, and getting angry over nothing. No one in her family will tell Merci what's going on, so she's left to her own worries, while also feeling all on her own at school."
Rainy Days / Short Stories by Contemporary Spanish Women Writers = Dias de Lluvia. by
"This anthology collects sixteen stories by contemporary Spanish women writers: Pilar Cibreiro, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Adelaida García Morales, Lourdes Ortiz, Laura Freixas, Marina Mayoral, Mercedes Abad, Rosa Montero, Maruja Torres, Soledad Puértolas, María Eugenia Salaverri, Nuria Amat, Juana Salabert, Luisa Castro and Berta Marsé. The stories are in the original Spanish and with facing-page English translations, and comprehensive bio-bibliographical information on each author is also included in the volume."
How Moon Fuentez Fell in Love with the Universe by
"When her twin sister reaches social media stardom, Moon Fuentez accepts her fate to be nothing more than her sister's camerawoman. Then Moon takes a summer job as the "merch girl" on a tour bus full of beautiful influencers and her fate begins to shift in the best way possible. Most notable is her bunkmate and new nemesis, Santiago Phillips, who is grumpy, combative, and also the hottest guy Moon has ever seen. As chance, destiny, and proximity bring the two of them in each other's perpetual paths, Moon starts to question her destiny as the unnoticed, unloved wallflower she always thought she was. -- adapted from jacket"
The Book of Wanderers by
"The Book of Wanderers is a collection of short stories that explores Latinx identity through the lens of newer generations of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas to the US. The theme of wandering comes up in each story, whether it be through feelings of unease or liberation, especially due to the cultural, physical, and/or psychological separation or loss from one generation to the next as a result of living in a tumultuous nation. To capture the complexity of Latinx identity, the stories also play with and within different genres, from 'literary' realist fiction to hallucinatory realist, magical realist, noir, science fiction, and speculative fiction stories"-- Provided by publisher.
Burn down, Rise Up by
When an urban legend rumored to trap people inside subway tunnels seems to be behind mysterious disappearances in the Bronx, sixteen-year-old Raquel and her friends team up to save their city - and confront a dark episode in its history in the process.For over a year, the Bronx has been plagued by unexplained disappearances. Raquel does her best to ignore it: after all, the police only look for the white kids. Then her crush Charlize's cousin goes missing - and Raquel's mom comes down with a mysterious illness that seems linked to the disappearances. Raquel and Charlize discover that everything is tied to a terrifying urban legend called the Echo Game. The game is rumored to trap people in a sinister world underneath the city, and the rules are based on a particularly dark chapter in New York's past. If the friends want to save their home - and everyone they love - they will have to play the game and destroy the evil. Or die trying. -- Adapted from jacket description.
Non-Fiction Books
Latinx Shakespeares by
"Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years--a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s--the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright's canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language. The book's focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism."
Latina Leadership Lessons by
Fifty prominent Latinas give their top ten tips for being a successful leader.
Transmovimientos by
"This anthology features work by and about queer, trans, and gender nonconforming Latinx communities, including immigrants and social dissidents who reflect on and write about diaspora and migratory movements while navigating geographical and embodied spaces in the United States"-- Provided by publisher.
Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century by
"Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary TV by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation all while recognizing that television still has a long way to go"-- Provided by publisher."Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume is comprehensive in its coverage while diving into detailed and specific examples as it navigates the complex and ever-changing world of Latinx representation and creation in television. In this volume, editor Frederick Luis Aldama brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward. TV narratives by and about Latinx people exist across all genres. In this century, we see Latinx people in sitcoms, sci-fi, noir, soap operas, rom-coms, food shows, dramas, action-adventure, and more. Latinx people appear in television across all formats, from quick webisodes, to serialized big-arc narratives, to animation and everything in between. The diverse array of contributors to this volume delve into this rich landscape of Latinx TV from 2000 to today, spanning the ever-widening range of genres and platforms. Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century argues that Latinx TV is not just television--it's an entire movement. Digital spaces and streaming platforms today have allowed for Latinx representation on TV that speaks to Latinx people and non-Latinx people alike, bringing rich and varied Latinx cultures into mainstream television and addressing urbanization, immigration, family life, language, politics, gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. Once heavily underrepresented and harmfully stereotypical, Latinx representation on TV is beginning to give careful nuance to regional, communal, and familial experiences among U.S. Latinx people. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, recognizing that television has come a long way, but there is still a lot of important work to do for truly diverse and inclusive representation." -- Publisher's description
Latinas on the Line by
"Latinas on the Line provides a compelling analysis and historical and theoretical grounding of the oral histories, never before seen, of Latina information workers in the Bell System from their entrance in 1973 to their retirements by 2015. Author Melissa Villa-Nicholas demonstrates the importance of Latinas of the field of telecommunications through their own words and uses supporting archival research to provide an overview of how Latinas engage and remember a critical analysis of their work place, information technologies, and the larger globalized economy and shifting borderlands through their intersectional identities as information workers. The book offers a rich and engaging portrait of the critical history of Latinas in telecommunications, from their manual to automated to digitized labor"-- Provided by publisher
Disappearing Rooms by
"In Disappearing Rooms Michelle Castañeda lays bare the criminalization of race enacted every day in U.S. immigration courts and detention centers. She uses a performance studies perspective to show how the theatrical concept of mise-en-scéne offers new insights about immigration law and the absurdist dynamics of carceral space. Castañeda draws upon her experiences in immigration trials as an interpreter and courtroom companion to analyze the scenography-lighting, staging, framing, gesture, speech, and choreography-of specific rooms within the immigration enforcement system. Castañeda's ethnographies of proceedings in a "removal" office in New York City, a detention center courtroom in Texas, and an asylum office in the Northeast reveal the depersonalizing violence enacted in immigration law through its embodied, ritualistic, and affective components. She shows how the creative practices of detained and disappeared peoples living under acute duress imagine the abolition of detention and borders. Featuring original illustrations by artist-journalist, Molly Crabapple, Disappearing Rooms shines a light into otherwise hidden spaces of law within the contemporary deportation regime. Duke University of Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient."-- Provided by publisher.
Why the assembly disbanded by
"Pushing the boundaries of Latinx literature and what constitutes a borderlands poetics Throughout Roberto Tejada's body of work, the renowned poet and celebrated critic has explored themes of Latinx culture, politics, history, language, and ecologies. In his latest collection, Why the Assembly Disbanded, he presents a unique contribution to Latinx letters that reflects on the relations between the U.S. and Latin America, especially their real and symbolic borderlands. Immersive, postmodern, and philosophical, Why the Assembly Disbanded provides an associative, critical Latinx aesthetic connecting the Mexico-U.S. borderlands to Latin America's neo-baroque heritage. Migrants, settlers, tourists, and exiles moving across various hemispheric landscapes are featured in these exuberant, capacious, and self-reflexive poems. Tejada relates the ravages of white supremacy in our culture that, together with immigrant precarity, turn home into a place of foreboding and impending eviction, even as a dream-weather makes room at last for scenes of possibility and attainment in the account of human history. The sweeping futuristic vista gives on to narratives of colonial extraction, human displacement, abuses of capitalism, mass media spectacle, the antagonism of language and technical images in the sensorium of urban and digital life-worlds, and the relations of desire encouraged by pictures and words in the economy of attention. Los Angeles and Mexico City figure prominently in poems committed to voicing modes of formation and community in an intersectional reckoning of personhoods prompted in work by artists Betye Saar, Amiri Baraka, Connie Samaras, and Ruben Ortiz Torres. With language given to pageantry, tonal precision, and a hopeful lyric radiance that can accommodate ecstasy and justice, Roberto Tejada's carnivalesque, borderland imagery pushes the boundaries of Latinx literature. World building by way of reverie, speculation, and retro-futurist tableaux, and with vivid, sometimes violent particularity, his poems enact hallucinatory realities of the hemisphere; an imagination that triangulates history, lyricism, and art as social practice"-- Provided by publisher
Latinx Teens by
"What can Latinx youth contribute to critical conversations on culture, politics, identity, and representation? Latinx Teens answers this question and more by offering an energetic, in-depth look at how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture."
Why is Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 to October 15?
- In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson declared an observance for Hispanic Heritage Week.
- 20 years later, President Ronald Reagan expanded the observance to cover a 30-day period starting on September 15 and ending on October 15.
- September 15 is significant because it is the anniversary of the independence of Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
- Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on September 16 and September 18.
Hispanic refers to a person who is from or a descendant of someone who is from a Spanish-speaking country.
Latino/a or Latinx refers to a person who is from, or a descendant of someone who is from, a country in Latin America.
Here are some articles that discuss the use of the word Latinx.
- To Latinx or Not to Latinx: A Question of Gender Inclusivity Versus Gender Neutrality
- The Complexity of the “x” in Latinx: How Latinx/a/o Students Relate to, Identify With, and Understand the Term Latinx
- THE NEW BUZZWXRDS.
- Latino, the Word.
- Offensive or Not Examining the Impact of Racial Microaggressions
- What’s in an “x”?: An Exchange about the Politics of “Latinx”
- If Hispanics Hate the Term “Latinx,” Why Is It Still Used?