Celebrating Latine/x books, films and music

For fans of Bloom and Spinning, critically-acclaimed writer Gabby Rivera (Marvel’s America) adapts her bestselling novel alongside artist Celia Moscote in an unforgettable queer coming-of-age story exploring race, identity and what it means to be true to your amazing self. Even when the rest of the world doesn’t understand. Juliet Milagros Palante is leaving the Bronx and headed to Portland, Oregon. She just came out to her family and isn’t sure if her mom will ever speak to her again. But Juliet has a plan to figure out what it means to be Puerto Rican, lesbian and out.

An isolated mansion. A chillingly charismatic aristocrat. And a brave socialite drawn to expose their treacherous secrets. . . . From the author of Gods of Jade and Shadow comes "a terrifying twist on classic gothic horror" (Kirkus Reviews) set in glamorous 1950s Mexico.

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. One of Oprah's Best Books of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway award winner, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi's extraordinary novel illuminates slavery's troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed--and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

La estructura de este libro es un zapping de la memoria y la observación. Las secciones que dan orden a los fragmentos aluden a una manera de habitar la Ciudad de México, todas ejercidas por el autor, quien sobrevivió para contarla.

A darkly funny and heartfelt debut novel about what it means to grow up young and black on the south side of Chicago when it feels like your choices are slim to none. Set in the epicenter of American racial politics, this novel follows Claude McKay Love, a young black man who feels stuck in a constant search for a place where he would fit.

Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father's role in an attempt to overthrow brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways as the girls try find new lives: by straightening their hair and wearing American fashions, and by forgetting their Spanish.

After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of “the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.”

From the beloved author of cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, which has now sold more than one million copies worldwide and has been translated into thirty-three languages, comes a spellbinding and otherworldly novel about a woman who believes she is an alien. Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman was one of the most unusual and refreshing bestsellers of recent years, depicting the life of a thirty-six-year-old clerk in a Tokyo convenience store. Now, in Earthlings, Sayaka Murata pushes at the boundaries of our ideas of social conformity in this brilliantly imaginative, intense, and absolutely unforgettable novel.

The critically acclaimed and Whiting Award-winning author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman returns with Libertie, an unforgettable story about one young Black girl's attempt to find a place where she can be fully, and only, herself. Coming of age as a freeborn Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie is to go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, feels stifled by her mother's choices and is hungry for something else—is there really only one way to have an autonomous life?

Proceed With Caution offers an alternate reality that is both mysterious and familiar. Whether it's a malevolent act born from the paranoia of living under a totalitarian regime, or the creeping sense of dread blanketing a small whaling town, the stories in Proceed With Caution linger in the memory, and make us question where the natural world ends and the supernatural begins.

El mundo de Mariana Enriquez no tiene por qué ser el nuestro, y, sin embargo, lo termina siendo. Bastan pocas frases para pisarlo, respirarlo y no olvidarlo gracias a una viveza emocional insólita. Con la cotidianidad hecha pesadilla, el lector se despierta abatido, perturbado por historias e imágenes que jamás conseguirá sacarse de la cabeza. Las autodenominadas “mujeres ardientes”, que protestan contra una forma extrema de violencia doméstica que se ha vuelto viral; una estudiante que se arranca las uñas y las pestañas, y otra que intenta ayudarla; los años de apagones dictados por el gobierno durante los cuales se intoxican tres amigas que lo serán hasta que la muerte las separe; el famoso asesino en serie llamado Petiso Orejudo, que sólo tenía nueve años; hikikomori, magia negra, los celos, el desamor, supersticiones rurales, edificios abandonados o encantados… En estos once cuentos el lector se ve obligado a olvidarse de sí mismo para seguir las peripecias e investigaciones de cuerpos que desaparecen o bien reaparecen en el momento menos esperado.

Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind.

Valiéndose de su experiencia como dirigente central de la Revolución Cubana, Guevara explica por qué la transformación revolucionaria de las relaciones sociales implica necesariamente la transformación de los trabajadores que organizan y dirigen ese proceso. "Para construir el comunismo, simultáneamente con la base material, hay que construir al hombre nuevo". Incluye el discurso presentado por Castro en 1987, con motivo del vigésimo aniversario de la muerte de Guevara. Sección de fotos de 8 páginas, notas, índice de nombres y temas.

The most talked about-and praised-first novel of 2007, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fuk-a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

This landmark collection is a life's work in poetry by the famous folklorist, novelist and mentor of at least two generations of Chicano scholars and writers.

Stories on strong Cuban women who live in a Hispanic barrio in Jersey City, pursuing love and wealth, frequently with rather weak men.

Was it a spectre from the past, some Aztec revenant that had inspired the "Black Widow" to kill her husband? Who better than Gloria Damasco, that indomitable detective with a flair for clairvoyance, to unravel this intricate and pulsing plot. Gloria soon finds herself in an uncanny struggle to rescue the soul of Licia, the Black Widow, who believes herself possessed by the spirit of La Malinche. 

Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Horror Cinema explores the different mechanisms and strategies through which horror films attempt to reinforce or contest gender relations and issues of sexual identity in the continent. The book explores issues of machismo, marianismo, homosociality, bromance, among others through the lens of horror narratives and, especially, it offers an analysis of monstrosity and the figure of the monster as an outlet to play out socio-sexual anxieties in different societies or gender groups. The author looks at a wide rage of films from countries such as Cuba, Peru, Mexico and Argentina and draws points of commonality, as well as comparing essential differences, between the way that horror fictions—considered by many as low-brow cinema—can be effective to delve into the way that sexuality and gender operates and circulates in the popular imaginary in these regions. 

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.

Often treated like night itself―both visible and invisible, feared and romanticized―Latina/os make up the largest minority group in the US. In her newest work, María DeGuzmán explores representations of night in art and literature from the Caribbean, Colombia, Central and South America, and the US, calling into question night's effect on the formation of identity for Latina/os in and outside of the US. She takes as her subject novels, short stories, poetry, essays, non-fiction, photo-fictions, photography, and film, and examines these texts through the lenses of nationhood, sexuality, human rights, exoticism, among others. 

With Latining America, Claudia Milian proposes that the economies of blackness, brownness, and dark brownness summon a new grammar for Latino/a studies that she names "Latinities." Milian's innovative study argues that this ensnared economy of meaning startles the typical reading practices deployed for brown Latino/a embodiment. Latining America keeps company with and challenges existent models of Latinidad, demanding a distinct paradigm that puts into question what is understood as Latino and Latina today. Milian conceptually considers how underexplored "Latin" participants—the southern.

This groundbreaking and important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. Arguing against the normative feminist model based on white women's experience, Aida Hurtado advances a theory of relational privilege to explain that the different responses to feminism are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men. Written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint that draws from psychology, economics, political science, and feminist theory, Hurtado's analysis is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros,Gloria Anzaldua, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group.

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.“Karla's book sheds light on people's personal experiences and allows their stories to be told and their voices to be heard.”

This book brings together contemporary artists from across the Americas who have tapped into science fiction’s capacity to imagine new realities, both utopian and dystopian. Science fiction offers a unique artistic landscape in which to explore the colonial enterprise that shaped the Americas and to present alternative perspectives speculating on the past and the future.

This volume explores works by diverse U.S. Latino and Latin American artists whose engagement with the concept of home provides the basis for an alternative narrative of post-war art. This book reveals the departures and confluences that continue to shape US Latino and Latin American art and expands our appreciation of these artists and their work.

Natalia Almeada's debut fiction film explores the interior life of Doña Flor as she awakens from her bureaucratic malaise and yearns to become visible again. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that bureaucratic dehumanization is a brutal form of violence, the story ultimately becomes a mesmerizing contemplation on solitude.

I AM THE QUEEN follows Bianca, Julissa and Jolizza as they prepare for the pageant under the guidance of Ginger Valdez, an experienced transgender from the neighborhood. These trans women share stories of their transition, their relatives' varying reactions, and how they find support from within the community. Family dynamics, cultural heritage, and personal identity all play a part in how the contestants face the daily struggle that comes from being true to themselves. 

The film stars Magaly Solier and addresses the fears of abused women during Peru's recent history.

Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse communities in the United States and the world. There are immigrants from every country in South America, Mexico, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and China. The people who live in Jackson Heights, in their cultural, racial and ethnic diversity, are representative of the new wave of immigrants to America. 

Tracking two parallel odysseys through the Amazon three decades apart, this visionary adventure epic from Colombian director Ciro Guerra offers a heart-rending depiction of colonialism laying waste to indigenous culture. 

Bebo Valdés, was a Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger. He was a central figure in the golden age of Cuban music, especially due to his big band arrangements and compositions of mambo, chachachá and batanga, a genre he created in 1952.

This 2007 compilation featuring all the hits recorded by Bebo Valdes with the legendary Sabor de Cuba band (1957-1960) and several tracks that appeared in the pre-configuration of that band with mainly the same personnel. 25 tracks including 'Sabor', 'Mississippi Mambo', 'Siempre Cantando' and more. 

David Oquendo, vocalist and music director of Raices Habaneras, founded his ensemble in order to preserve the pure form and essence of Cuban rhythms.

Featuring some of the finest Latino roots music the Smithsonian Folkways archive has to offer from such artists as Nati Cano’s Los Camperos, Luiz Bonfa, and Cuarteto Patria and Compay Segundo (Buena Vista Social Club), this specially priced CD brings you a collection of Latino sounds beyond the conventional! Much like rock ‘n’ roll, Latino music evolved from folk traditions. Raíces Latinas is a celebration of these Amerindian, African, and European influences in music of Latino heritage and a representation of the lively creativity that gives birth to the music of the Americas. Including Latino roots music from the Caribbean to the Andes and from Brazil to the American Southwest, Raíces Latinas invites you to discover the music behind la música! 

Venezuela’s Caribbean coastal town of Naiguatá is home to one of that country’s most celebrated Carnival musical traditions. In the 1970’s, trumpeter Ricardo Díaz augmented the local legacy of Afro-Caribbean drumming traditions with brass, electric bass, keyboard, and women’s chorus to create La Sardina de Naiguatá, the musical group that drives the town’s annual cycle of public celebrations, including Carnival, Corpus Christi, and St. John the Baptist. ¡Parranda! brings us the contemporary, joyous sounds of the pre-Christian rite of “burying the sardine” to promote an abundant harvest of fish and crops.