Hispanic American Heritage Month: Recommended Reading
National Hispanic American Heritage Month is celebrated annually from September 15 to October 15. At NC State, we also recognize and celebrate Latinx Heritage Month during this time. This September, the Popular Reading Display in the Hill Library's Learning Commons will feature books that explore the experiences, celebrate the contributions, and promote understanding of the diverse cultures within the Hispanic and Latinx communities. Learn more about Hispanic American Heritage Month.
Don’t miss the other great recommendations in DEI/DIY: Latinx Heritage (2022), our collaboration with the Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity.
September 2023
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My Beloved World
Author: Sonia Sotomayor
This autobiography details the inspiring story of Sonia Sotomayor, from her childhood in the Bronx to becoming the first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Sonia’s passionately spirited grandmother and many other mentors throughout her life helped shape a remarkable journey of self-invention and self-discovery.
The Hurting Kind: Poems
Author: Ada Limón
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s poetry ruminates on the interconnectedness and severed ties between humans, nature, and each other. This poetry collection travels through seasons, the pandemic, family, loss, ghosts and abundance with remarkably personal and relatable reflections on life.
Finding Latinx: In search of the voices redefining Latino identity
Author: Paola Ramos
Finding Latinx is an empowering cross-country travelogue on the controversial term, “Latinx.” Paola Ramos draws on intensive field research to raise up the voices of chronically overlooked Latino communities in large cities and small towns: Afrolatino, indigenous, Muslim, queer, activists and undocumented.
Radical Cartographies: Participatory mapmaking from Latin America
Editors: Bjørn Sletto, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, Charles Hale
In twelve essays written by community leaders, activists and scholars, Radical Cartographies critically explores participatory mapping. Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other traditional groups in Latin America reclaim the technology from its troubled history to preserve their territories and cultural identities.
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano mariposa
Author: Rigoberto González
Butterfly Boy is the heartbreaking and intensely personal coming out and coming-of-age story of a first-generation Chicano trading one life for another. Rigoberto González confronts the cultural estrangement of his adopted home in the United States and a Mexican birthright to claim his identity at the intersection of race, class and sexuality.
Borderlands = La Frontera
Author: Gloria Anzaldúa
Visionary Chicana, lesbian, activist, and writer Gloria Anzaldúa's essays and poems continue to profoundly challenge how we think about identity. This collection remaps the understanding of "border" not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.
Feminism for the Americas: The making of an international human rights movement
Author: Katherine M. Marino
Katherine M. Marino’s research includes six leaders of the global women's rights movement. These remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women’s deep friendships, intense rivalries and foundational understanding of the power relations at the heart of international affairs forged global feminism from an era of imperialism, racism and fascism.
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Author: Carmen Maria Machado
At the borders of psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism, Her Body and Other Parties is an electric and provocative genre bending collection of startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
Chilean Poet : a novel
Author: Alejandro Zambra
In a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, an aspiring poet reunites with his high school girlfriend and they soon form a happy sort-of family with her six-year-old son, Vicente. Zambra’s novel explores the many meanings of family from estranged step fathers to the loving dysfunctional bond among the eccentric community of living Chilean poets.
Gordo: Stories
Author: Jaime Cortez
Gordo is a collection of short stories set in a migrant workers camp during the 1970s that starts with a young boy putting on a wrestler's mask and trying to grow into his father’s idea of manhood. Cortez braids together inviting stories with humor, family drama and a sweet frankness about serious matters that redefines all-American.
Harvest of Empire: A history of Latinos in America
Author: Juan Gonzalez
Latinos’ impact on American popular culture—from food to entertainment to literature—is greater than ever. Featuring the accounts of immigrant Latino pioneers and the events and conditions that compelled them to leave their homelands, Harvest of Empire brings new light to the history and legacy of this increasingly influential group.
Mexican Gothic
Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Set in glamorous 1950s Mexico, Noemí Taboada arrives at an enigmatic mansion in the distant countryside to answer her newly-wed cousin’s frantic letter. Dark visions invade Noemí’s dreams as she investigates her cousin's menacing and alluring English husband, uncovering the history of his family’s colossal wealth and faded mining empire.
Notes and Guides
National Hispanic American Heritage Month: Exhibits and collections from the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
