Books to Read for Latinx Heritage Month

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs–yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

De jóvenes, Florentino Ariza y Fermina Daza se enamoran apasionadamente, pero Fermina eventualmente decide casarse con un médico rico y de muy buena familia. Florentino está anonadado, pero es un romántico. Su carrera en los negocios florece, y aunque sostiene 622 pequeños romances, su corazón todavía pertenece a Fermina. Cuando al fin el esposo de ella muere, Florentino acude al funeral con toda intención. A los cincuenta años, nueve meses y cuatro días de haberle profesado amor a Fermina, lo hará una vez más.

Linda, an anxious and restless American, has moved to São Paulo, with her husband, Dennis, who has accepted a yearlong professorship. As Dennis submerges himself in his work, Linda finds herself unmoored and adrift. Linda’s unwavering and skilled maid, Marta, has more claim to Linda’s home than Linda can fathom. Marta, who is struggling to make sense of complicated history and its racial tensions, is exasperated by Linda’s instability. One day, Linda leaves home with a charismatic artist, and ultimately binds Marta and Linda in a profoundly human, and tender, way. Listen to the audiobook here.

Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his supression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his “deathbed ode to eroticism,” Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author’s acclaimed novels.

From the author of The House of the Spirits comes this epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents follows two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home. Listen to the audiobook here.

Un viaje a través de la historia del siglo XX de la mano de unos personajes inolvidables que descubrirán que en una sola vida caben muchas vidas y que, a veces, lo difícil no es huir sino volver.

Discover Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s journey from a New York City homeless shelter to the top of his Princeton class. Undocumented is essential reading for the debate on immigration, but it is also an unforgettable tale of a passionate young scholar coming of age in two very different worlds.

The co-founder of the Women’s March makes her YA debut in a near future dystopian where a young girl and her brother must escape a xenophobic government to find sanctuary. It’s 2032, and in this near-future America, all citizens are chipped and everyone is tracked–from buses to grocery stores. It’s almost impossible to survive as an undocumented immigrant, but that’s exactly what sixteen-year-old Vali is doing. She and her family have carved out a stable, happy life in small-town Vermont, but when Vali’s mother’s counterfeit chip starts malfunctioning and the Deportation Forces raid their town, they are forced to flee. Listen to the audiobook here.

The characters in Samanta Schweblin’s brilliant new novel, Little Eyes, reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls–but yet they also expose the ugly side of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to unexpected love, playful encounters, and marvelous adventure, but what happens when it can also pave the way for unimaginable terror? In this prophecy of a story, Schweblin creates a dark and complex world that’s somehow so sensible, so recognizable, that once it’s entered, no one can ever leave. Listen to the audiobook here.

Los personajes de esta novela encarnan el aspecto más real –y a la vez imprevisible– de la compleja relación que tenemos con la tecnología, reavivando la noción del exhibicionismo y exponiendo al lector a los límites del prejuicio, el cuidado de los otros, la intimidad, el deseo y las buenas intenciones. Kentukis es una novela deslumbrante que potencia su sentido mucho más allá de la atracción que genera desde sus páginas. Una idea insólita y oscura, tan sensata en sus reflejos que, una vez que se entra en ella, ya no se puede salir.

Seventeen-year-old Marisol has always dreamed of being American. She never pictured fleeing her home in El Salvador under threat of death and stealing across the US border as “an illegal”, but after her brother is murdered and her younger sister, Gabi’s, life is also placed in equal jeopardy, she has no choice. With truly no options remaining, Marisol jumps at an unusual opportunity to stay in the United States. She’s asked to become a grief keeper, taking the grief of another into her own body to save a life. It’s a risky, experimental study, but if it means Marisol can keep her sister safe, she will risk anything. She just never imagined one of the risks would be falling in love, a love that may even be powerful enough to finally help her face her own crushing grief. Listen to the audiobook here.

Discover provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. Listen to the audiobook here.

Puerto Rican poet Vincent Toro’s new collection takes the Latin American idea of an artistic social gathering (the “tertulia”) and revises it for the Latinx context in the United States. In verses dense with juxtaposition, the collection examines immigration, economics, colonialism and race via the sublime imagery of music, visual art, and history. Toro draws from his own social justice work in various U.S. cities to create a kaleidoscopic vision of the connections between the personal and the political, the local and the global, in a book that both celebrates and questions the complexities of the human condition.

In defiance of the brutal military government that took power in Uruguay in the 1970s, and under which homosexuality is a dangerous transgression, five women miraculously find one another—and, together, an isolated cape that they claim as their own. Over the next thirty-five years, they travel back and forth from this secret sanctuary. A groundbreaking, genre-defining work, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit. Listen to the audiobook here.

Cantoras, la obra maestra de De Robertis, es un asombroso retrato de amor, comunidad, historia, y la fuerza del espíritu humano. Eterna e innovadora, Cantoras es una novela sobre el fuego que existe en el alma y sobre quienes lo hacen arder.

In this empowering cross-country travelogue, journalist and activist Paola Ramos embarks on a journey to find the communities of people defining the term, “Latinx.” She introduces us to the indigenous Oaxacans who rebuilt the main street in a post-industrial town in upstate New York, the “Las Poderosas” who fight for reproductive rights in Texas, the musicians in Milwaukee whose beats reassure others of their belonging, as well as drag queens, environmental activists, farmworkers, and the migrants detained at our border. Drawing on intensive field research as well as her own personal story, Ramos chronicles how “Latinx” has given rise to a sense of collectivity and solidarity among Latinos unseen in this country for decades. Listen to the audiobook here.

En esta inspiradora crónica de viaje de costa a costa, la periodista y activista Paola Ramos emprende una búsqueda de los individuos y comunidades que dan vida a un nuevo movimiento que esta definiendo el término controversial “Latinx”. A partir de su trabajo periodístico sobre el terreno, así como de su historia personal, Ramos ilustra como el término “Latinx” ha dado paso a un sentimiento de pertenencia y solidaridad sin precedentes entre los latinos de este país.

Pulga has his dreams. Chico has his grief. Pequeña has her pride. Crossing from Guatemala through Mexico, they follow the route of La Bestia, the perilous train system that might deliver them to a better life–if they are lucky enough to survive the journey. With nothing but the bags on their backs and desperation drumming through their hearts, Pulga, Chico, and Pequeña know there is no turning back, despite the unknown that awaits them. And the darkness that seems to follow wherever they go.

Discover Pura Belpré Award Winner Ruth Behar’s inspiring story of a young Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba, while she works to rescue the rest of her family. Listen to the audiobook here.

Oscar “Chino” Uribe is a young Peruvian journalist for a local tabloid paper. After the recent death of his philandering father, he must confront the idea of his father’s other family, and how much of his own identity has been shaped by his father’s murky morals. At the same time, he begins to chronicle the life of street clowns, sad characters who populate the violent and corrupt city streets of Lima, and is drawn into their haunting, fantastical world. With the city of Lima as a character, and the bold visual language from the story, City of Clowns is moving, menacing, and brilliantly vivid.

Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents’ house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga’s role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. It’s not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister’s story? Listen to the audiobook here.

Julia no es la hija mexicana perfecta. Ese era el rol de su hermana Olga. Olga no fue a la universidad, se quedó en casa para cuidar a sus padres, limpiar la casa y trabajar a medio tiempo. Julia tiene grandes sueños y no quiere formar parte del camino de su hermana mayor. Pero un solo error, que ocurre mientras enviaba un mensaje de texto al mismo tiempo que cruzaba la calle más concurrida de Chicago, resulta en la muerte de Olga, dejando atrás a Julia para ocuparse de las secuelas. Sus padres, quienes inmigraron ilegalmente a Chicago desde México en busca de una vida mejor, están inconsolables. La madre de Julia parece canalizar su dolor para señalar de todas las maneras posibles que Julia no es la hija mexicana perfecta que Olga era. Pero Julia pronto descubre que Olga puede haber tenido secretos, también. Con la ayuda de su mejor amiga Lorena, Julia está decidida a descubrirlo. ¿Era Olga realmente lo que parecía? ¿O había algo más en la historia de su hermana? Empieza a escuchar aquí.

When fifteen-year-old Maribel Rivera sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it’s not long before Maribel attracts the attention of Mayor Toro, who sees a kindred spirit in this beautiful, damaged outsider. Their love story sets in motion events that will have profound repercussions for everyone involved. The Book of Unknown Americans is a stunning novel of hopes and dreams, guilt and love—a book that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American. Listen to the audiobook here.

Dos familias cuyas esperanzas chocan con el destino. Y una extraordinaria novela que nos ofrece una poderosa y nueva definición de lo que significa ser americano. Arturo y Alma Rivera han vivido toda la vida en México. Un día, Maribel, la hija a la que tanto quieren, sufre un grave accidente y la probabilidad de que se recupere completamente es poca. Dejando todo atrás, los Rivera emigran a los Estados Unidos con un solo sueño: que en este país de tantos recursos y oportunidades, Maribel se recupere. Cuando Mayor Toro, cuya familia es de Panamá, ve a Maribel en un Dollar Tree, es amor a primera vista. También es el principio de una amistad entre las familias Rivera y Toro, y de una red de culpa, amor y responsabilidad que es el núcleo de esta novela. Intercalado en sus historias están los testimonios de mujeres y hombres que han llegado a los Estados Unidos de todo Latino América. Sus viajes y voces te inspirarán, y te partirán el corazón. Intrigante, irónica e inmediata, humana y llena de espíritu, El libro de los americanos desconocidos es una obra rebosante de fuerza y originalidad.

Seven-year-old Chula lives a carefree life in her gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside her walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar reigns, capturing the attention of the nation. When her mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city’s guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona’s mysterious ways. As both girls’ families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy. Listen to the audiobook here.

Inspirado en la propia vida de la autora y contado a través de las perspectivas alternas de la voluntariosa Chula y la dolorosamente esperanzada Petrona, La fruta del borrachero contrasta dos historias muy diferentes pero inextricables. En una prosa exuberante, Rojas Contreras arroja luz sobre las decisiones casi imposibles que enfrentan a menudo las mujeres frente a la violencia, y las conexiones inesperadas que pueden surgir a raíz de la desesperación.

Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity. At once wide in scope and intimate, Everything Inside explores with quiet power and elegance the forces that pull us together or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.

Danny is brown. Half-Mexican brown. And growing up in San Diego that close to the border means everyone else knows exactly who he is before he even opens his mouth. Before they find out he can’t speak Spanish, and before they realize his mom has blond hair and blue eyes, they’ve got him pegged. But it works the other way too. And Danny’s convinced it’s his whiteness that sent his father back to Mexico. That’s why he’s spending the summer with his dad’s family. But to find himself, he may just have to face the demons he refuses to see–the demons that are right in front of his face. And open up to a friendship he never saw coming.

Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands. Listen to the audiobook here.

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. Listen to the audiobook here.

Ambitious high school senior Efrain Rodriguez dreams of escaping the South Bronx for an Ivy League college like Harvard or Yale. But how is his family going to afford to pay for a prestigious university when Moms has to work insane hours to put food on the table as it is? And Efrain wouldn’t dare ask that good-for-nothing father of his who has traded his family in for younger models. Left with few options, Efrain chooses to do something he never thought he would. He embarks on a double life—honor student by day, drug peddler at night—convinced that by temporarily capitulating to society’s negative expectations of a boy like him, he can eventually defy them.

In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way. Listen to the audiobook here.

Un matrimonio en crisis viaja en coche con sus dos hijos pequeños desde Nueva York hasta Arizona. Ambos son documentalistas y cada uno se concentra en un proyecto propio: él está tras los rastros de la última banda apache en rendirse al poder militar estadounidense; ella busca documentar la diáspora de niños que llegan a la frontera sur del país en busca de asilo. Mientras el coche familiar atraviesa el vasto territorio norteamericano, los dos niños, sentados en el asiento trasero, escuchan las conversaciones e historias de sus padres y a su manera confunden las noticias de la crisis migratoria con el genocidio de los pueblos originarios de Norteamérica. En su imaginación, estas historias se entremezclan, dando lugar a una aventura que es la historia de una familia, un país y un continente. Escucha el audiolibro.

Emma Reyes was an illegitimate child, raised in a windowless room in Bogotá with no water or toilet and only ingenuity to keep her and her sister alive. Illiterate and knowing nothing of the outside world, she escaped at age nineteen, eventually establishing a career as an artist, befriending the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as well as European artists and intellectuals, and being encouraged in her writing by Gabriel García Márquez. Comprised of letters written over the course of thirty years, this astonishing memoir describes in painterly detail the remarkable courage and limitless imagination of a young girl growing up with nothing. Discovered only after Reyes’s death, it reveals a gifted writer whose talent remained hidden for far too long. Listen to the audiobook.

Emma Reyes era una niña ilegítima, criada en una habitación sin ventanas en Bogotá sin agua ni inodoro, y que sobrevivía únicamente de su ingenio para mantenerse a ella misma y a su hermana. Abandonada por su madre, ambas niñas se son acogidas por un convento católico que albergaba a 150 niñas huérfanas, donde lavaban ollas, planchaban y reparaban la ropa, fregaban pisos, limpiaban baños, cosían prendas y telas decorativas para las monjas y vivían con temor al Diablo. Analfabeta y sin saber nada del mundo exterior, Emma escapó a los diecinueve años, estableciendo una carrera como artista y forjando amistades con Frida Kahlo y Diego Rivera, así como con artistas e intelectuales europeos. El retrato de su infancia que surge de este relato clarividente inspira en el lector un asombro especial hacia la deslumbrante vida de una talentosa escritora cuyo talento permaneció oculto por demasiado tiempo.

Marc Moreau, a professional cyclist with a military past, is part of a top Tour de France team led by his best friend, an American star favored to win this year’s Tour. But the competition takes a dark turn when racers begin to drop out in a series of violent accidents. In the final stages of the race Mark himself emerges as the only cyclist left who could possibly beat his best friend and win the Tour. But whom can Marc trust? Listen to the audiobook here.

The Shape of the Ruins is a masterly story of conspiracy, political obsession, and literary investigation. When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings. Listen to the audiobook here.

Follow a daughter’s quest to understand her charismatic and troubled father, an immigrant who crosses borders both real and illusory—between sanity and madness, science and spirituality, life and death. Listen to the audiobook here.

In American Poison, the New York Times veteran shows how racial animus has stunted the development of nearly every institution crucial for a healthy society, including organized labor, public education, and the social safety net. The consequences are profound and are only growing graver with time. Leading us through history and across America–from FDR’s New Deal through Bill Clinton’s welfare reform to Donald Trump’s retrograde and divisive policies–Porter pieces together how racial hostility has blocked American social cohesion at every turn, producing a nation that fails not only its black and brown citizens but white Americans as well. Listen to the audiobook here.

En El precio del racismo Porter, periodista veterano del New York Times, muestra cómo la animadversión racial ha paralizado gran parte de las instituciones clave de una sociedad sana, incluyendo los sindicatos, la educación pública y la red de seguridad social, y cómo las profundas consecuencias se hacen cada día más graves. A través de un repaso de la historia reciente –desde el New Deal de Frankin D. Roosvelt, y las reformas de Bill Clinton o Barack Obama, hasta la política divisiva de Donald Trump— Porter argumenta cómo la hostilidad racial ha bloqueado en cada paso la cohesión social, dando lugar a un país que no solo falla a sus ciudadanos de color, sino a todos, incluidos los blancos.

The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only Brazil’s most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature, who has been championed by the likes of Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike, and Salman Rushdie. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (translated also as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir.  Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty, and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to the work of everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Nabokov to Borges to Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world.

The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous-Sandra Cisneros’ masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers. Listen to the audiobook.

Elogiado por la crítica, admirado por lectores de todas las edades, en escuelas y universidades de todo el país y traducido a una multitud de idiomas, La casa en Mango Street es la extraordinaria historia de Esperanza Cordero. Contado a través de una serie de viñetas —a veces desgarradoras, a veces profundamente alegres— es el relato de una niña latina que crece en un barrio de Chicago, inventando por sí misma en qué y en quién se convertirá. Pocos libros de nuestra era han conmovido a tantos lectores. Empieza a escuchar aquí.

A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced an unforgettable narrator— Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his family’s precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of industrial New Jersey, and their epic passage from hope to loss to something like love. Here is the soulful, unsparing book that made Díaz a literary sensation. Listen to the audiobook here.

El lector tiene en sus manos una colección de relatos que viene precedida de una enorme expectación. Su autor, seleccionado por Newsweek como uno de los diez nuevos rostros para el noventa y seis, nos transporta desde los pueblos y parajes polvorientos de su tierra natal, la República Dominicana, hasta los barrios industrials y el paisaje urbano de New Jersey, bajo un horizonte de chimeneas humeantes. La obra triunfal que marcó el arranque literario de Junot Díaz puede ahora disfrutarse en una edición en español que conserva en su integridad la fuerza desabrida y la delicadeza del texto original.Los niños y jóvenes que pueblan las páginas de Negocios gravitan sin sosiego por territorios marginales, a mitad de camino entre la inocencia y la experiencia, entre la curiosidad infantil y la crueldad más descarnada. Criados en hogares abandonados por el padre, donde todo se sostiene gracias a la férrea abegación de la madre, estos adolescentes acarician sueños de independencia, asomándose con recelo a un mundo donde intuyen que no hay un lugar reservado para ellos. En estos diez relatos la prosa de Junot Díaz oscila con sabiduría entre el humor, la desolación y la ternura, desplegando en cada página un estilo palpitante de vida.

If life wasn’t already hard enough for Beatriz — being a teenager, trying to start a band, and going to school — then she discovers that her grandfather’s soul has been trapped in an old guitar, and that the only way to free him is to play the perfect song . . . his perfect song, a song that he never actually wrote down. She’s determined to save her grandfather, but as music slowly takes over her life, she soon finds herself growing obsessed with his song, and making it absolutely flawless, at the expense of her friendships, her band, and her health. A story filled with music, passion, supernatural secrets, and family, Jose Pimienta’s Suncatcher brings to life a contemporary story of life in Mexicali with a supernatural twist and a lot of music.