Latino/a Literature/Non-fiction - My favorites
Discover the best Latino and Latin American literature in this curated list of favorite fiction and non-fiction books. From Gabriel García Márquez's timeless classics like *One Hundred Years of Solitude* to contemporary voices like Angie Cruz and Sandra Cisneros, explore powerful stories of culture, identity, and history. Featuring authors such as Julia Alvarez, Oscar Hijuelos, and Esmeralda Santiago, this collection highlights must-read Latino literature for every book lover.
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The Meaning of Consuelo
by Judith Ortiz Cofer
The Signe family is blessed with two daughters. Consuelo, the elder, is thought of as pensive and book-loving, the serious child-la niña seria-while Mili, her younger sister, is seen as vivacious, a ray of tropical sunshine. Two daughters: one dark, one light; one to offer comfort and consolation, the other to charm and delight. But, for all the joy both girls should bring, something is not right in this Puerto Rican family; a tragedia is developing, like a tumor, at its core. In this fierce, funny, and sometimes startling novel, we follow a young woman's quest to negotiate her own terms of survival within the confines of her culture and her family. magazine "Judith Ortiz Cofer has created a character who takes us by the hand on a journey of self-discovery. She reminds readers young and old never to forget our own responsibilities, and to enjoy life with all its joys and sorrows."--Bessy Reyna, MultiCultural Review
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Down These Mean Streets
by Piri Thomas
A modern classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence—and a lyrical memoir of coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. "A report from the guts and heart of a submerged population group ... It claims our attention and emotional response." —The New York Times Book Review Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating memoir. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery—a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop. As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice.
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Caramelo
by Sandra Cisneros
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Every year, Ceyala “Lala” Reyes' family—aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, and Lala's six older brothers—packs up three cars and, in a wild ride, drive from Chicago to the Little Grandfather and Awful Grandmother's house in Mexico City for the summer. From the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Struggling to find a voice above the boom of her brothers and to understand her place on this side of the border and that, Lala is a shrewd observer of family life. But when she starts telling the Awful Grandmother's life story, seeking clues to how she got to be so awful, grandmother accuses Lala of exaggerating. Soon, a multigenerational family narrative turns into a whirlwind exploration of storytelling, lies, and life. Like the cherished rebozo, or shawl, that has been passed down through generations of Reyes women, Caramelo is alive with the vibrations of history, family, and love. From the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
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Dreaming in Cuban
by Cristina García
“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post
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The Aguero Sisters
by Cristina García
Reina and Constancia Agüero are Cuban sisters who have been estranged for thirty years. Reina--tall, darkly beautiful, and magnetically sexual--still lives in her homeland. Once a devoted daughter of la revolución, she now basks in the glow of her many admiring suitors, believing only in what she can grasp with her five senses. The pale and very petite Constancia lives in the United States, a beauty expert who sees miracles and portents wherever she looks. After she and her husband retire to Miami, she becomes haunted by the memory of her parents and the unexplained death of her beloved mother so long ago. Told in the stirring voices of their parents, their daughters, and themselves, The Agüero Sisters tells a mesmerizing story about the power of myth to mask, transform, and finally, reveal the truth--as two women move toward an uncertain, long awaited reunion.
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When I was Puerto Rican
by Esmeralda Santiago
Selling over 16,000 copies in hardcover, this triumphant coming-of-age memoir is now available in paperback editions in both English and Spanish. In the tradition of Black Ice, Santiago writes lyrically of her childhood on her native island and of her bewildering years of transition in New York City.
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Almost a Woman
by Esmeralda Santiago
"Negi," as the author's family affectionately calls her, leaves rural Macun in 1961 to live in a three-bedroom tenement apartment with seven siblings, an inquisitive grandmother, & a strict mother who won't allow her to date. At thirteen, Negi yearns for her own bed, privacy, & her father, who remains in Puerto Rico. Translating for Mami at the welfare office in the morning, starring as Cleopatra at New York's Performing Arts High School in the afternoon, & dancing salsa all night, she also seeks to find balance between being American & Puerto Rican. When Negi defies her mother by going on a series of dates, she finds the independence brings challenges. At one a universally poignant coming-of-age tale & a heartfelt immigrant's story, this book is the author's journey into womanhood.
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America's Dream
by Esmeralda Santiago
América Gonzalez is a hotel housekeeper on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, cleaning up after wealthy foreigners who don't look her In the eye. Her alcoholic mother resents her; her married boyfriend, Correa, beats her; and their fourteen-year-old daughter thinks life would be better anywhere but with América. So when América is offered the chance to work as alive-in housekeeper and nanny for a family in Westchester County, New York, she takes it as a sign that a door to escape has been opened. Yet even as América revels in the comparative luxury of her new life, daring to care about a man other than Correa, she is faced with dramatic proof that no matter what she does, she can't get away from her past.
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Las Mamis
by Esmeralda Santiago
A marvelous anthology from the editors of Las Christmas—the bestselling author of When I Was Puerto Rican and the founder of L.A. Weekly—in which our most acclaimed Latino authors share unforgettable memories of their mothers. The women lovingly portrayed in Las Mamis represent a cross section of Latino life and culture. They come from rich families in the big cities of Latin America, from rural immigrant families, and from the worlds in between—and they share an extraordinary inner strength, often maintained against incredible odds. Pressed by conflicting cultural expectations, circumstance, and religion, they have managed the challenges of motherhood, leaving enduring legacies for their children. Now, in these vivid, poignant, and sometimes hilarious reminiscences—all of them infused with distinct sabor latino—Las Mamis celebrates the universality of family love and the special bond between mothers and children. Contributors include: Esmeralda Santiago, Piri Thomas, Marjorie Agosin, Junot Diaz, Alba Ambert, Liz Balmaseda, Mandalit del Barco, Gioconda Belli, Maria Escandon, Dagoberto Gilb, Francisco Goldman, Jaime Manrique, Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Ilan Stavans.
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The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. 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. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage ... and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review
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Woman Hollering Creek
by Sandra Cisneros
A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
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Loose Woman
by Sandra Cisneros
A candid, sexy and wonderfully mood-strewn collection of poetry that celebrates the female aspects of love, from the reflective to the overtly erotic. • From the bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review “All poets would do well to follow the example of Sandra Cisneros, who takes no prisoners and has not made a single compromise in her language.” — Barbara Kingsolver, Los Angeles Times
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In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republica in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.
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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez
YA. 15 inter-related stories chronicling the assimilation of four Dominican sisters into American society.
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In the Name of Salomé
by Julia Alvarez
A novel based on the life of Profesora Camila Henríquez-Ureña, a teacher whose mother was Salomé Ureña, famous nineteenth-century political poet from the Dominican Republic.
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Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Tie-in
by Oscar Hijuelos
Cesar and Nestor Castillo move to New York from Cuba in 1949 to form a mambo band, and eventually play on I Love Lucy.
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The Empress of the Splendid Season
by Oscar Hijuelos
Through four novels in the last decade, Oscar Hijuelos has produced a body of work that is without rival in contemporary literature, both in the lush, incantatory rhythms of his extraordinary prose and in his profound and heartfelt vision. In his transcendent new novel, Hijuelos tells the story of Lydia Espana, a beautiful and formerly prosperous émigré from pre-Castro Cuba, who becomes a cleaning lady in New York. Once the spoiled, pampered daughter of a small-town mayor and adored by men--a "queen of the Congo line"--she is forced because of a youthful sexual indiscretion to leave home and, in 1947, finds herself suddenly living the life of a working poor. In time she falls in love with Raul, a humble waiter. One night in a Manhattan ballroom, in the middle of a bolero, Raul purposes marriage, for Lydia is his "empress of the most beautiful and splendid season, which is love." A life of promise is disrupted when Raul falls ill and Lydia, finding employment as a domestic, becomes the head of the family. Striving to educate her town children, Rico and Alicia, in the style of the upper class, she must endure a lesson in humanity, cleaning the homes of New Yorkers much better off than herself. Among her employers is Mr. Osprey, a reserved and kindly lawyer, who eventuality takes an interest in her family's well-being and, during the turmoil of the 1960s, intervenes at a critical juncture in the life of her teenage son, Rico. Throughout this novel Lydia remains a sensual and powerful woman who meets the trails of a lonely life with humor and a gleam of triumph in her eye--a sense that she is someone special--an empress of fortitude, of dignity. Hijuelo's genius for evoking the heart and soul of his characters has never been more vivid, moving, and impassioned than in Empress of the Splendid Season. A master of eloquent detail, Hijuelos allows Lydia to open up, alive and vibrant on the page. No one writes better of love or the pulse of the city. And no one has better captured the complexity of what happens to generations of people who come to America: how assimilation ius at once the achievement of dreams and yet, sometimes, a loss of what has rooted us to the past. Lydia, I am to you, as a sparrow adoring the sky; Lydia, you are as the moon reflecting upon the water, which is my soul; Lydia, you are the queen of beauty, the Empress of my love, and you preside over the splendidness of my feelings for you, like the morning sun on the most glorious day of the most beautiful and splendid season, which is love... -- Raul Espana to his future wife on the night he proposed marriage, 1949, from Empress of the Splendid Season
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A Simple Habana Melody
by Oscar Hijuelos
It is 1947, and Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life had once been a dream of music, love, and sadness, returns to Cuba after being mistakenly imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of France. When Levis arrives back in Habana, his mind returns to an unrequited romance with the alluring Rita Valladares, a singer for whom Levis had written his most famous song, "Rosas Puras." This 1928 composition became the most famous rumba in the world and changed American and European tastes in music and dance forever. A love story -- of art, family, and country -- A Simple Habana Melody is a virtuoso performance from one of our most important writers.
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Geographies of Home
by Loida Maritza Perez
After leaving the college she'd attended to escape her religiously conservative parents, Iliana, a first-generation Dominican-American woman, returns home to Brooklyn to find that her family is falling apart: one sister is careening toward mental collapse, another sister is living in a decrepit building with her abusive husband and three children, and a third sister has simply disappeared. In this dislocating urban environment Iliana reluctantly confronts the anger and desperation that seem to seep through every crack of her family's small house, and experiences all the contradictions, superstitions, joys, and pains that come from a life caught between two cultures. In this magnificent debut novel, filled with graceful prose and searing detail, Loida Maritza Pérez offers a penetrating portrait of the American immigrant experience as she explores the true meanings of identity, family--and home.
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Let It Rain Coffee
by Angie Cruz
Angie Cruz has established herself as a dazzling new voice in Latin American fiction, her writing compared to Gabriel García Márquez's by The Boston Globe. Now, with humor, passion, and intensity, she reveals the proud members of the Colón family and the dreams, love, and heartbreak that bind them to their past and the future. Esperanza risked her life fleeing the Dominican Republic for the glittering dream she saw on television, but years later she is still stuck in a cramped tenement with her husband, Santo, and their two children, Bobby and Dallas. She works as a home aide and, at night, hides unopened bills from the credit card company where Santo won't find them when he returns from driving his livery cab. When Santo's mother dies and his father, Don Chan, comes to Nueva York to live out his twilight years with the Colóns, nothing will ever be the same. Don Chan remembers fighting together with Santo in the revolution against Trujillo's cruel regime, the promise of who his son might have been, had he not fallen under Esperanza's spell. Let It Rain Coffee is a sweeping novel about love, loss, family, and the elusive nature of memory and desire.
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Soledad
by Angie Cruz
Award-winning author Angie Cruz takes readers on a journey as one young woman must confront not only her own past of growing up in Washington Heights, but also her mother's. At eighteen, Soledad couldn't get away fast enough from her contentious family with their endless tragedies and petty fights. Two years later, she's an art student at Cooper Union with a gallery job and a hip East Village walk-up. But when Tía Gorda calls with the news that Soledad's mother has lapsed into an emotional coma, she insists that Soledad's return is the only cure. Fighting the memories of open hydrants, leering men, and slick-skinned teen girls with raunchy mouths and snapping gum, Soledad moves home to West 164th Street. As she tries to tame her cousin Flaca's raucous behavior and to resist falling for Richie—a soulful, intense man from the neighborhood—she also faces the greatest challenge of her life: confronting the ghosts from her mother's past and salvaging their damaged relationship. Evocative and wise, Soledad is a wondrous story of culture and chaos, family and integrity, myth and mysticism, from a Latina literary light.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family.
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel García Márquez
A New York Times Notable Book On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit–he has purchased hundreds of women–he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to the master’s work.
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold
by Gabriel García Márquez
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes the gripping story of the murder of a young aristocrat that puts an entire society—not just a pair of murderers—on trial. A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion.
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Of Love and Other Demons
by Gabriel García Márquez
Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons haunts us with its evocation of an exotic world while it treats, majestically, of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.
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Collected Novellas
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Renowned as a master of magical realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has long delighted readers around the world with his exquisitely crafted prose. Brimming with unforgettable characters and set in exotic locales, his fiction transports readers to a world that is at once fanciful, haunting, and real. Leaf Storm, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first novella, introduces the mythical village of Macondo, a desolate town beset by torrents of rain, where a man must fulfill a promise made years earlier. No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella of life in a decaying tropical town in Colombia with an unforgettable central character. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a dark and profound story of three people joined together in a fatal act of violence.
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Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry
by Stephen Tapscott
"Large anthology includes work by 58 poets. Extensive, but general, introduction. Poets arranged chronologically from Josâe Martâi to Marjorie Agosâin. Volume includes few surprises and relatively few women. Bilingual format. Many translators; great fluctuation in quality. For detailed discussion of translations, see Charles Tomlinson in Times Literary Supplement, May 9, 1997; and Eliot Weinberger in Sulfur, 40, Spring 1997"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
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Drown
by Junot Díaz
From the beloved and award-winning author Junot Díaz, a spellbinding saga of a family’s journey through the New World. A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot Díaz's exhilarating talents. It also 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.
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Cubana
by Ruth Behar
Until recently, the combination of a Cuban old boys' network and an ideological emphasis on "tough" writing kept fiction by Cuban women largely unknown and unread. Cubana, the U.S. version of a groundbreaking anthology of women's fiction published in Cuba in 1996, introduces these once-ignored writers to a new audience. Havana editor and author Mirta Yáñez has assembled an impressive group of sixteen stories that reveals the strength and variety of contemporary writing by Cuban women-and offers a glimpse inside Cuba during a time of both extreme economic difficulty and artistic renaissance. Many of these stories focus pointedly on economic and social conditions. Josefina de Diego's "Internal Monologue on a Corner in Havana" shows us the current crisis through the eyes and voice of a witty economist-turned-vendor who must sell her extra cigarettes. Others-Magaly Sánchez's erotic fantasy "Catalina in the Afternoons" and Mylene Fernández Pintado's psychologically deft "Anhedonia (A Story in Two Women)"-reveal a nascent Cuban feminism. The twelve-year-old narrator of Aida Bahr's "The Scent of Limes" tries to make sense of her grandparents' conservative values, her stepfather's disappearance, and her mother's fierce independence. The Cuban-American writer Achy Obejas recreates the strange dual identity of the immigrant, while avant-garde stories like the playful and savvy "The Urn and the Name (A Merry Tale)," written by Ena Lucía Portela, reveal the vitality of the experimental tradition in Cuba. And Rosa Ileana Boudet's "Potosí 11: Address Unknown" is both a romantic paean to a time of youth, passion, and revolution, and an attempt to reconcile that past with a diminished present.
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Pedro Páramo
by Juan Rulfo
Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of the author. In one such village of the mind, Comala, he set his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed, Susana San Juan.
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Under the Feet of Jesus
by Helena Maria Viramontes
A moving and powerful novel about the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions as migrant workers in California’s fields. “Viramontes depicts this world with sensuous physicality...working firmly in the social-realist vein of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.”—Publishers Weekly One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years At the center of this powerful tale is Estrella, a girl about to cross the perilous border to womanhood. What she knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment by her husband in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the farms that feed its people. But within Estrella, seeds of growth and change are stirring. And in the arms of Alejo, they burst into a full, fierce flower as she tastes the joy and pain of first love. Pushed to the margins of society, she learns to fight back and is able to help the young farmworker she loves when his ambitions and very life are threatened in a harvest of death. Infused with the beauty of the California landscape and shifting splendors of the passing seasons juxtaposed with the bleakness of poverty, this vividly imagined novel is worthy of the people it celebrates and whose story it tells so magnificently. The simple lyrical beauty of Viramontes’ prose, her haunting use of image and metaphor, and the urgency of her themes all announce Under the Feet of Jesus as a landmark work of American fiction. Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature Selected as the Univesity of Oregon's 2019 Common Reading book
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The House on the Lagoon
by Rosario Ferré
Caught up in his wife's efforts to write a novel about the history of their families, Quintin Mendizabal sparks a heated rivalry between Isabel and himself when they have different perspectives on the same story
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Eccentric Neighborhoods
by Rosario Ferré
Eccentric Neighborhoods is a an attempt to lay bare the psychological conflicts that determine the relationships between mothers and daughters and the story of Puerto Rico's transformation, from the beginning of the century, into a spearhead of the Caribbean.
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Malinche
by Laura Esquivel
When Malinalli, a member of the tribe conquered by the Aztec warriors, first meets Cortes, she -- like many -- believes that he is the reincarnated forefather god of her tribe. Naturally, she assumes that her task is to help Cortes destroy the Aztec empire and free her people. The two fall passionately in love, but Malinalli gradually comes to realize that Cortes's thirst for conquest is all too human. He is willing to destroy anyone, even his own men, even their own love.Throughout Mexican history, Malinalli has been reviled for her betrayal of the Indian people. However, recent historical research has shown that her role was much more complex; she was the mediator between two cultures, Hispanic and Native American, and two languages, Spanish and Nahuatl.Bursting with lyricism and vivid imagery, Malinche finally unveils the truth behind this legendary love affair.