In Praise of Pioneers of Change for Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month: A Reading List
October 03, 2024
A Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month unmarred by election-year drama would have been a miracle. No such luck in 2024. Not with anti-immigrant rhetoric regrowing its Hydra’s head when right-wing candidates take to the debate and rally stages. If that weren’t enough, Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month started off with news that Jeanine Cummins will release new novel next year about the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico. Did the publishing world learn nothing from her American Dirt snafu or from the consequences of bankrolling white-savior complexes 4 years ago?
So, in the spirit of this year’s theme, Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together, we recommend these titles from Beacon’s catalog. Titles from authors who are pioneering change with truth-telling, by centering Hispanic/Latinx voices. Titles about pioneers of Hispanic/Latinx communities and the diaspora. We can shape the future together by reading them. ¡Adelante!
An African American and Latinx History of the United States
“Mexicans, African Americans, and their abolitionist allies conceived of a hemispheric liberation movement that would not be tied to nationality nor constrained by borders. They also knew that slavery’s relentless cycle of growth would destroy democracy.”
—Paul Ortiz
antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano: poemas/poems
“al tratarte como agua, te asumiría como esencial y cotidiana.
a esto aspiro cuando me enamoro, a que seas mi agua.
como somos los dos de aquí, estamos un poco
contaminados y el trato debe tomarlo en cuenta.
te trato como una isla que mira a otra isla
y entiende que el agua es poder.
sé que mezclo cosas, pero el trato es la mezcla de todas las cosas
que nos hicimos cuando nos quitaron la tierra,
talaron nuestros bosques y repartieron los frutos.”
/
“to treat you like water, i’d have to assume you
as essential and daily.
i aspire to this when i fall in love, that you be my water.
since we are both from here, we are a bit
contaminated, which treatment must consider.
i treat you like an island looks at another
and understands water is power.
i know i’m mixing things, but treatment
is the mixture of all the things
we did to each other when they took our land,
cut down our forests
and distributed our crops.”
—Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, de “la aproximación/from “to approach”
A Cup of Water Under My Bed, 10th- Anniversary Edition: A Memoir
“After this memoir was published, readers showed up in bookstores and libraries and over social media to tell me that I had written their childhoods. The readers were Chinese or Haitian, or they were Dominican or Colombian. While I had written to love the family that had made me and the girl I had once been, readers told me that this love was not private at all but part of a larger narrative about language, migration, and colonialism.”
—Daisy Hernández, from the new preface
Inocencia racial: Desenmascarando la antinegritud de los latinos y la lucha por la igualdad
“Queda oculto que la indiferencia de los latinos hacia la negritud desempeña un papel en la condición de subordinación de los afrolatinos y, a su vez, la exclusión de los afroamericanos. Los supervisores latinos en los lugares de trabajo les niegan a ambos grupos de negros el acceso a ascensos y aumentos salariales. Los propietarios de viviendas latinos rechazan a potenciales inquilinos y compradores negros. Los trabajadores latinos en restaurantes no permiten la entrada de negros y se niegan a servirles. Los estudiantes latinos hostigan y abusan de estudiantes negros. Los educadores latinos menosprecian a los estudiantes negros. Los oficiales de policía latinos agreden y matan a negros. Los más odiosos son los latinos que ingresan en organizaciones de poder blanco violentas y hacen daños a los negros. Sin embargo, aun cuando los latinos no se identifiquen racialmente como blancos, como un supremacista blanco, su identidad exclusivamente latina no mitiga los ejemplos de antinegritud antes mencionados.”
—Tanya Katerí Hernández
Mothercoin: The Stories of Immigrant Nannies
“These women’s stories reveal that the mothercoin is not an industry or an immigration pattern, but an approach to value. The invisibility is what does the harm, the insignificance attributed to the work and to the woman and to the choices she has confronted. When the work is swept under the rug, so are the cultural expectations about a woman’s place in the home, on the job. When the woman is little more than a household expense, her landscape of choice succumbs to the cold reality of supply and demand and her humanity is compromised by a hierarchy of value that pits the faces of the mothercoin against each other: presence against protection, labor against love. The deepest damage comes from a language that paints these conflicts as the result of her own choices.”
—Elizabath Cummins Muñoz
Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels
“My understanding of the criminal underworld has been turned on its head. What I used to think was a man’s world is increasingly appearing less so as I learn more about the women present in positions at every level of the drug trade. Now I question what we understand about organized crime and how it works. Fundamentally, how much can we know about the decision-making process and the dynamics within these organizations without understanding women’s roles intimately? Their roles cannot be pigeonholed or oversimplified. Much as the women in today’s licit, legal world are taking on more prominent roles and higher profiles, it’s logical that such a trend should also be reflected in the criminal underworld. And in the case of the women in this book, they’re all connected: by geography, by criminal organizations, and by shared business interests.”
—Deborah Bonello
Some of the Light: New and Selected Poems
“This land is your land,
this land is Comanche land,
Mescalero Apache land,
Coahuiltecan land, my ancestors—
bent to build the Alamo, then slaughtered
and buried beneath it, risen again, to be forgotten,
now a river to be walked upon, treaded by tourists,
on a mission, who find San Antonio a city
with two thighs, good only for entering and exiting.”
—Tim Z. Hernandez, from “Variations on This Land”
“They Take Our Jobs!”: And 20 Other Myths About Immigration
“Most histories of the United States portray its national identity very differently, as a melting pot made up of ethnically diverse immigrants . . . But in fact US nationality has historically been based very much on race. Congress first enacted a naturalization law—determining who could become a citizen of the United States—in 1790, fourteen years after the country was established. The law restricted naturalization to ‘free white persons.’ ‘White’ was not defined—its meaning was thought to be obvious. Neither, for that matter, was ‘persons’—but it went without saying that ‘persons’ meant ‘male persons.’ With the growth of racial pseudoscience in the nineteenth century, Congress and the courts were increasingly drawn into trying to define who was and was not racially ‘white’ and therefore eligible for citizenship.”
—Aviva Chomsky
Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us from Factory Farming
“When it comes to the meat, dairy, and eggs we eat, the price at the grocery store or restaurant is never a fair reflection of the true cost. In factory farming, risks and liability are mostly externalized by the industry, and most often to the most vulnerable among us. This damage, this harm, is borne by many—from the workers to the animals to the farmers. The industry makes extraordinary profits off this harm by externalizing risk and liability. Externalities are the root of the business model, and they’ve driven the spectacular success, power, and wealth of this industry. But because these costs are hidden from those who purchase the products, consumers don’t affirmatively consent to the harm caused by eating animals and their products.”
—Leah Garcés
We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America
“My mother’s greatest hope was that we’d fit in, that we would be as much a part of the scenery as the sweeping dunes and the Confederate flag on the Marshalls’ living room wall. We, of course, did not understand the meaning of the flag. Indeed, when the Marshall girl and my third-grade self would race up and down Lake Avenue on our bikes and she’d holler, “The South will rise again!” I’d join in. It was my father, having noticed the flag through the window one day, who suggested I should spend less time with the Marshalls. He explained about the Confederacy. “But we’re not black,” my mother pointed out. “It doesn’t matter,” he responded. To her dying day, my mother would say she was white, never mind her nappy hair, never mind the map on her face that betrayed that assertion.”
—Achy Obejas, from “Secret Lives”
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.