Notable books in English by Latino/a writers giving voice to the migrant experience ///Libros destacados en ingles de escritores latinos que dan voz a la experiencia de la emigración. (Algunos disponibles en español.)
Solito
Solito (edición en español)
Javier Zamora. June, 2023.
A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this “gripping memoir” (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family. A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora’s story, but it’s also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews
The Undocumented Americans
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. 2021
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • 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.
Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she’d tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer’s phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, BOOK RIOT, LIBRARY JOURNAL, AND TIME
Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions
Valeria Luiselli. April 2017
Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, Winner of an American Book Award, Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Listed in The Guardian’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century”, Awarded a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
La línea se convierte en río. Una crónica de la frontera (edición en español)
Fracisco Cantú. Feb 2018.
NAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST; FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NONFICTION AWARD
The son of a park ranger, Francisco Cantú grew up in the southwest. When he joined the Border Patrol, he became witness to the stark realities of the desert, where the obligations of his job weighed heavy against his sense of humanity. “[The Line Becomes a River] lays bare, in damning light, the casual brutality of the system, how unjust laws and private prisons and a militarized border have shattered families and mocked America’s myths about itself.” —New York Times Book Review
Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
Una vez fui tu (edición en español)
Maria Hinojosa. 2020.
The Emmy Award–winning journalist and anchor of NPR’s Latino USA tells the story of immigration in America through her family’s experiences and decades of reporting, in this memoir that is “quite simply beautiful, written in Maria Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice” (BookPage). Bestselling author Julia Álvarez has called her “one of the most important, respected, and beloved cultural leaders in the Latinx community.”
In Once I Was You, Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago. She offers a personal and illuminating account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also sanctioned willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country’s most vulnerable populations.
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen
Querida América: Notas de un ciudadano indocumentado (edición en español)
Jose Antonio Vargas. 2019.
Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time.
“This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.
After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.”
—Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America
The Distance Between Us: A Memoir
La distancia entre nosotros (edición en español)
Reyna Grande. 2013.
In this inspirational and unflinchingly honest memoir, acclaimed author Reyna Grande describes her childhood torn between the United States and Mexico, and shines a light on the experiences, fears, and hopes of those who choose to make the harrowing journey across the border.
Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years in this “compelling…unvarnished, resonant” (BookPage) story of a childhood spent torn between two parents and two countries. As her parents make the dangerous trek across the Mexican border to “El Otro Lado” (The Other Side) in pursuit of the American dream, Reyna and her siblings are forced into the already overburdened household of their stern grandmother. When their mother at last returns, Reyna prepares for her own journey to “El Otro Lado” to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father.
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Albergue Sagrado Corazón Pro Migrante IAP 