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438 books match the query 'Hispanic & Latino' and 11 start with i

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I Am My Own Path

Edited and with an introduction by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

University of Texas Press, 2023

2026 Silver Medal for the Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – Spanish, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
A definitive, bilingual selection of poetry, essays, and letters by one of Puerto Rico’s most beloved poets.

Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) is best known for her poetry, but she is also an important cultural figure famous for her commitment to social justice, feminist ideas, and the independence of Puerto Rico. Admirers cultivated her legacy to bring to light the real Julia de Burgos, the woman behind the public figure, which this remarkable collection further illuminates by supplying a complex portrait using her own powerful and imaginative words.

Beginning with a critical introduction to Burgos's life and work, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario then presents a selection of poems, essays, and letters, that offer a glimpse into this formidable talent and intellect. Burgos left Puerto Rico, spending the 1940s in both New York City and Havana, where she cultivated a new kind of identity refracted through her pathbreaking work as a poet and journalist. Both poetry and prose are alive with politically charged insights into the struggle of national liberation, literary creation, and being a woman in a patriarchal society. I Am My Own Path is essential reading for anyone interested in Puerto Rican literature and culture as well as a foundational text of Latinx literature and culture in the United States.

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If I Die in Juárez

Stella Pope Duarte

University of Arizona Press, 2008

From the red-light districts in Ciudad Juárez to remote villages hidden away in the mountains of Chihuahua comes a tale of one of the darkest crimes to be recorded in the history of humankind. If I Die in Juárez traces the lives of three young women—Evita, a street child; Petra, a maquiladora worker; and Mayela, a Tarahumara Indian girl—who together uncover Juárez’s forbidden secret: the abduction and murder of young women. Bound together by blood, honor, an ancient chant, and a mysterious photo, the girls bring the murderous streets of Juárez to life.

Based on the author’s interviews with relatives of murdered women, If I Die in Juárez is brilliantly crafted to give readers the experience of walking in the shoes of women who daily risk being abducted and murdered in the “capital city of murdered women,” joining thousands of others who for more than a decade have disappeared from Juárez, las desaparecidas, brutally murdered by assassins who have gone unpunished. The agony of one of the darkest tales in human history brings to light a strange hope, illusive yet constant, resisting lies, betrayal, and the desert’s silent sentence of death.

Read an in-depth review of If I Die in Juárez here or click here for a study guide. If I Die in Juárez was also reviewed on KNAU's Southwest Book Review program. Listen here!

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In Search of Snow

Luis Alberto Urrea

University of Arizona Press, 1999

In the hot Arizona desert of the late 1950s, Mike McGurk comes of age in one big, riotous gush. Trapped pumping gas at a desolate roadstop, he yearns for things he has never known: love, hope, and the soft, white calmness of snow. Mike's world is filled with a menagerie of quirky characters, who cope with the weight of their unfulfilled dreams with bravado, humor, and violence. Mike trades snappy insults with his macho father, Texaco Turk McGurk, a moustachioed amateur boxer and self-proclaimed war hero who is unable to talk about love. Mike lusts after Lily, his seductive, poem-writing cousin. He cowers before and then confronts the vicious Ramses, grandson of Mr. Sneezy, the wisecracking Apache. And he is rescued by his best friend, Bobo, who delivers him into the care of the loving and generous Mama and Papa Garcia.

In Search of Snow is an explosive coming-of-age adventure, full of hilarious episodes and still, poignant moments. Like a blue-collar Don Quixote, Mike must blow up his windmills before he can set off to find the things he lacks, especially the snow that will temper the passion he has just set aflame.

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In Visible Movement

Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

Urayoan Noel

University of Iowa Press, 2014

Since the 1960s, Nuyorican poets have explored and performed Puerto Rican identity both on and off the page. Emerging within and alongside the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the foundational Nuyorican writers sought to counter the ethnic/racial and institutional invisibility of New York City Puerto Ricans by documenting the reality of their communities in innovative and sometimes challenging ways. Since then, Nuyorican poetry has entered the U.S. Latino literary canon and has gained prominence in light of the spoken-word revival of the past two decades, a movement spearheaded by the Nuyorican Poetry Slams of the 1990s. Today, Nuyorican poetry engages with contemporary social issues such as the commodification of the body, the institutionalization of poetry, the gentrification of the barrio, and the national and global marketing of identity. What has not changed is a continued shared investment in a poetics that links the written word and the performing body.

The first book-length study specifically devoted to Nuyorican poetry, In Visible Movement is unique in its historical and formal breadth, ranging from the foundational poets of the 1960s and 1970s to a variety of contemporary poets emerging in and around the Nuyorican Poets Cafe “slam” scene of the 1990s and early 2000s. It also unearths a largely unknown corpus of poetry performances, reading over forty years of Nuyorican poetry at the intersection of the printed and performed word, underscoring the poetry’s links to vernacular and Afro-Puerto Rican performance cultures, from the island’s oral poets to the New York sounds and rhythms of Latin boogaloo, salsa, and hip-hop. With depth and insight, Urayoán Noel analyzes various canonical Nuyorican poems by poets such as Pedro Pietri, Victor Hernández Cruz, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Sandra María Esteves, and Tato Laviera. He discusses historically overlooked poets such as Lorraine Sutton, innovative poets typically read outside the Nuyorican tradition such as Frank Lima and Edwin Torres, and a younger generation of Nuyorican-identified poets including Willie Perdomo, María Teresa Mariposa Fernández, and Emanuel Xavier, whose work has received only limited critical consideration. The result is a stunning reflection of how New York Puerto Rican poets have addressed the complexity of identity amid diaspora for over forty years.

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In an Angry Season

Lisa D. Chávez

University of Arizona Press, 2001

A white woman navigates her fear and uncertainty to learn the ways of the people she called savages, until she begins to dream “in Dakota, syllables sliding / on my tongue like tender pieces of meat.” An African man, on display as a cannibal at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, sees into the future: “humiliations heaped up / as on overfilled plates . . . / . . . a country that casually / consumes its own.” A woman holds the gray-blue barrel of a gun in her mouth, “the taste familiar / as her own blood.”

With an unexcelled command of narrative verse, Lisa Chávez tells the stories of American lives across more than a century. Whether retelling nineteenth-century captivity narratives or depicting contemporary American women confronting addiction and despair, Chávez investigates issues of identity and self-definition in the face of an often harsh and unremitting history.

Her story-poems explore the ways in which people have been made captive—whether to racism or national policy, to bad marriages or alcoholism, to poverty or emotion—from the Inuit woman birthing a son among strangers to the wife now deranged by desire for another man: “He’s the smoky slow-burn of chipotle on the tongue. My golden idol. My gospel revival. He’s hashish sweet and languorous—my body’s one desire.”

In the end, Chávez shows us a New World of promise in which an alchemist’s assistant summons stories from stones by calling their names with “clicks of her tongue, / syllables of silver, turquoise, and jade,” and a Native woman discovers her true power in an Alaskan bar. Passionate and political, In an Angry Season is a work of startling depth and breadth—an American history in poetry—that asks us what it means to be civilized.

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In the City of Smoking Mirrors

Albino Carrillo

University of Arizona Press, 2004

Huitzilopochtli has returned. Aztec destroyer, god of sun and war. He of the hummingbird. Son of Coatlique, Our Lady of the Serpent Skin. But you can call him H. H. is reborn in the sprawling suburbs of an American metroplex in the late twentieth century, a place where "the future is a cartoon of the future." Life in suburbia is hard for an Aztec god: H. falls in and out of love, works downtown as an oficinista, raises children, and learns to command the awesome power of modern electronic media. Then one indifferent summer's day H. is seriously wounded by the police—in a case of mistaken identity, of course—and faces death once more.

In the City of Smoking Mirrors relates H.'s adventures as he hovers between life and death, revisiting his homeland and ancestors. He issues letters and edicts—to the faithful, to his dead amigos—and chronicles his circumnavigation of the Land of the Dead and "what he saw there that made him write this book." In tantalizing verse that walks the edge of dream, Albino Carrillo takes readers on a lyrical exploration of a dark netherworld, a quest for hope in a universe overshadowed by impending doom—a place where "The demons you'll have to defeat on your inward journey / Are like so many little yellow hornets buzzing about / Window screens in summer, angry but looking / For anything sweet, any way out . . . ." Through the unforgettable persona of Huitzilopochtli, Carrillo shows us the transitory nature of our passions and wounds as he chisels a new headstone for our times.

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In the Garden of the Bridehouse

J. Michael Martinez

University of Arizona Press, 2014

Through lyrical procedures of self-immolation, this brave new collection by J. Michael Martinez interrogates the sundry roles language, myth, and sexuality play for the self and the other in the recoverable and irrecoverable past. Parallel to his award-winning first collection Heredities, J. Michael Martinez pushes the boundaries of poetic form, wedding historically oppositional lyrical traditions to deliver a collection unlike any other.

Turning the page into a visual field, as in the deconstructed musical score telling the tale of La Llorona, In the Garden of the Bridehouse questions the line between visual art and poetry. The work employs the vernacular, the stylized language of theory, and the blank canvas of the page in its exploration of the known and unknowable.

Throughout the work, Martinez paradoxically exercises both a lyrical minimalism and a baroque poetic, uniting Mesoamerican preconquest imaginary with the sensuality of the Biblical Song of Songs, cultivating a lyrical space wherein contrasting potentials are—as one—realized in their shared promise.

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In the Good Years

Laura Cresté

Four Way Books, 2025

A high-lyric historian of the human project, Laura Cresté fixes her scrupulous gaze on the interwoven threads of this distressed anthropocene era, taking in the whole cloth of our globalized societies while recording the singular details of our individual lives and most intimate relationships—their intricate embroidery, characterizing stains, and fraying hems. In the Good Years confronts a painful family legacy, returning to the violent artistic censorship of Argentina's military dictatorship, her relatives' survival of a Dirty War death camp, and the scattered paths of their migration to safer ground. In reconstructing the past, Cresté resists the individualistic contraction of the coming of age model, not merely solidifying the psychological actualization of a single person as they enter adulthood but discursively expanding the notion of self, discovering the boundaries of identity as they overlay the seams of the broader world. These poems exist because of a narrowly avoided fate, and they bristle with the wild energy of improbable existence even as they touch on seemingly unrelated and often ordinary things: a roast chicken recipe, an aunt's questionable romantic advice, flea-ridden dogs, high school parties, waitressing at a dive bar, drowned newts in the swimming pool, unruly tomato plants, horseback riding. "Once saddled across a mare / named Ramona, I was afraid of the burden of my body," Cresté writes, fearful "that she would buckle—an animal once ridden into war." The sheer brilliance of this book's poetics manifest in lines like these, which bring political, personal, and ecological considerations to bear on the concept of weight in the space of a single sentence. What is the heft of a life that was nearly disappeared? How does a number become a weapon to enforce the gendered economy graphing desirability against power? What is the size of our footprint on this planet, and how heavy must our presence currently be as the animals and the land reach their breaking point? How much do you weigh? How much weight can you carry? "I was a teenager and jealous of the freedom / I imagined belonged to the thin," Cresté admits. "Now I know no one feels free, // not even the creature who devoured / the countryside, ravenous for the time / we were allowed in the field." This stunning debut champions that ravening, relishes the external and internal wilderness of the surrounding environment and our own human nature, and honors appetite as an opportunity to savor each bite for as long as we get to sit at the table. Throughout, these poems keenly subvert experience and memory, asking how we will remember this moment, and if the blessing of being here means we are somehow, even now in all the present's suffering, living in the good years.

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Informal Empire

Mexico And Central America In Victorian Culture

Robert D. Aguirre

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Behind the ancient artifacts exhibited in our museums lies a secret past—of travel, desire, the quest for knowledge, and even theft. Such is the case with the objects of Mesoamerican culture so avidly collected, cataloged, and displayed by the British in the nineteenth century. Informal Empire recaptures the history of those artifacts from Mexico and Central America that stirred Victorian interest—a history that reveals how such objects and the cultures they embodied were incorporated into British museum collections, panoramas, freak shows, adventure novels, and records of imperial administrators.

Robert D. Aguirre draws on a wealth of previously untapped historical information to show how the British colonial experience in Africa and the Near East gave rise to an “informal imperialism” in Mexico and Central America. Aguirre’s work helps us to understand what motivated the British to beg, borrow, buy, and steal from peripheral cultures they did not govern. With its original insights, Informal Empire points to a new way of thinking about British imperialism and, more generally, about the styles and forms of imperialism itself.

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Intersections of Harm

Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance

Halperin, Laura

Rutgers University Press, 0

In this innovative new study, Laura Halperin examines literary representations of harm inflicted on Latinas’ minds and bodies, and on the places Latinas inhabit, but she also explores how hope can be found amid so much harm. Analyzing contemporary memoirs and novels by Irene Vilar, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ana Castillo, Cristina García, and Julia Alvarez, she argues that the individual harm experienced by Latinas needs to be understood in relation to the collective histories of aggression against their communities.

Intersections of Harm is more than just a nuanced examination of the intersections among race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. It also explores the intersections of deviance and defiance, individual and collective, and mind, body, and place. Halperin proposes that, ironically, the harmful ascriptions of Latina deviance are tied to the hopeful expressions of Latina defiance. While the Latina protagonists’ defiance feeds into the labels of deviance imposed on them, it also fuels the protagonists’ ability to resist such harmful treatment. In this analysis, Halperin broadens the parameters of literary studies of female madness, as she compels us to shift our understanding of where madness lies. She insists that the madness readily attributed to individual Latinas is entwined with the madness of institutional structures of oppression, and she maintains that psychological harm is bound together with physical and geopolitical harm.

In her pan-Latina study, Halperin shows how each writer’s work emerges from a unique set of locales and histories, but she also traces a network of connections among them. Bringing together concepts from feminism, postcolonialism, illness studies, and ecocriticism, Intersections of Harm opens up exciting new avenues for Latina/o studies.

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Invisibility and Influence

A Literary History of AfroLatinidades

Regina Marie Mills

University of Texas Press, 2024

2026 Honorable Mention, Latinx Studies Section, Social Sciences Category, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

A rich literary study of AfroLatinx life writing, this book traces how AfroLatinxs have challenged their erasure in the United States and Latin America over the last century.

Invisibility and Influence demonstrates how a century of AfroLatinx writers in the United States shaped life writing, including memoir, collective autobiography, and other formats, through depictions of a wide range of “Afro-Latinidades.” Using a woman-of-color feminist approach, Regina Marie Mills examines the work of writers and creators often excluded from Latinx literary criticism. She explores the tensions writers experienced in being viewed by others as only either Latinx or Black, rather than as part of their own distinctive communities. Beginning with Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg, who contributed to wider conversations about autobiographical technique, Invisibility and Influence examines a breadth of writers, including Jesús Colón; members of the Young Lords; Piri Thomas; Lukumi santera and scholar Marta Moreno Vega; and Black Mexican American poet Ariana Brown. Mills traces how these writers confront the distorted visions of AfroLatinxs in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and how they created and expressed AfroLatinx spirituality, politics, and self-identity, often amidst violence. Mapping how AfroLatinx writers create their own literary history, Mills reveals how AfroLatinx life writing shapes and complicates discourses on race and colorism in the Western Hemisphere.