Collection: Shop Latinx

Third title to the critically received and nationally-recognized poet Yesika Salgado.

From Pura Belpré Honoree Adrianna Cuevas is a sweeping, emotional middle grade historical novel about a twelve-year-old boy who leaves his family in Cuba to immigrate to the U.S. by himself, based on the author's family history.

"I don't remember. Tell me everything, Pepito. Tell me about Cuba."

When the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 solidifies Castro's power in Cuba, twelve-year-old Cumba's family makes the difficult decision to send him to Florida alone. Faced with the prospect of living in another country by himself, Cumba tries to remember the sound of his father's clarinet, the smell of his mother's lavender perfume.

Life in the United States presents a whole new set of challenges. Lost in a sea of English speakers, Cumba has to navigate a new city, a new school, and new freedom all on his own. With each day, Cumba feels more confident in his new surroundings, but he continues to wonder: Will his family ever be whole again? Or will they remain just out of reach, ninety miles across the sea?

A Kirkus Best Children's Book of the Year
2024 Middle Grade Read Aloud list

"...Cuevas' latest is a triumph of the heart...A compassionate, emotionally astute portrait of a young Cuban in exile." --Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW

"Cuevas' intense and immersive account of a Cuban boy's experience after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion brings a specific point in history alive." --Booklist, STARRED REVIEW

"Cuevas packs this sophomore novel with palpable emotions and themes of friendship, love, longing, and trauma, attentively conveying tumultuous historical events from the lens of one young refugee." -- Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

In Alex Z. Salinas' previous poetry collections, he commenced conversation between the damaged body politic within himself and the bizarre, sometimes beautiful dream worlds of writers, painters and musicians-Muses-living and dead. In Hispanic Sonnets, the dials are turned up, the stakes (whatever they may be) are heavier, and the chorus of voices is louder, clearer. Hispanic Sonnets is part homage to the venerated and part turning the other cheek. In the final section of this book, a series of 15-line, free-verse sonnets continue the dialogue Salinas started in South Texas, or, to him, the center of his heart. This collection is the dream the poet still lives in, shattered and stitched back together with family, love, loss, pride and dignity; in short, Hispanic Sonnets is the book that least embarrasses him.

A note on Hispanic sonnets

What is a Hispanic sonnet? It is a 15-line, free-verse poem with a separated last line as its own

stanza. Each Hispanic sonnet's second and final stanza-that lonely little manmade

island-serves as its volta, or turn, meaning that where the poem ends in idea, tone, or spirit is

not necessarily where it begins.

Let it be known, then: a Hispanic sonnet is not really a sonnet.

Shakespeare transformed the 14-line English sonnet. Petrarch perfected the much-older 14-line

Italian sonnet. Wanda Coleman dazzled with her rule-busting, 14-line American sonnets, and

Terrance Hayes carried her tradition to new heights.

Corpus Christi's first Poet Laureate, Alan Berecka, informed me that writers he'd encountered

have penned 15-line sonnets called quince sonnets. Having never attended a quinceañera or a

quinceañero, I-a non-Spanish-speaking South Texan-smiled upon learning this grain of

poetry's organic history. Quince sonnets seemed to me, naturally, inevitable. The sweetest,

tangiest apples and oranges ever within reach.

The poet Iliana Rocha, whom I had the pleasure to read with on a virtual open mic, has authored

a beautiful, 18-line (by my count) poem titled "Mexican American Sonnet." Juan Felipe Herrera,

former United States Poet Laureate and the first Hispanic appointed to that role, once told me

he'd removed commas from a poem after having mastered them.

It is in this shadow, perhaps, that I arrived at the Hispanic sonnet, whose name is the only

invention herein I claim. The chasm between two stanzas representing everything and

nothing-the worst and best of what we are capable of in community and in solitude.

Everything else remains an inevitability.

A BreakBeat Poets anthology that opposes silence and re-mixes the soundtrack of the Latinx diaspora across diverse poetic traditions.

A searing memoir that explores the institutions that defined a Puerto Rican woman and what she unlearned to rediscover herself - "A lushly written, deeply felt investigation into the meanings of home, lineage and selfhood." --Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Body Work and Girlhood

Growing up in the Midwest, raised by a Puerto Rican mother who was abandoned by her family, Jamie Figueroa and her sisters were estranged from their culture, consumed by the whiteness that surrounded them. In Mother Island, Figueroa traces her search for identity as shaped by and against a mother who settled into the safety of assimilation. In lyrical, blistering prose, Figueroa recalls a childhood in Ohio in which she was relegated to the background of her mother's string of failed marriages; her own marriage in her early twenties to a man twice her age; how her work as a licensed massage therapist helped her heal her body trauma; and how becoming a mother has reshaped her relationship to her family and herself. Only as an adult in New Mexico was Figueroa able to forge her own path, using writing to recast her origin story. In a journey that takes her to Puerto Rico and back, Figueroa looks to her ancestors to reimagine her relationship to the past and to her mother's native island, reaching beyond her own mother into a greater experience of mothering and claiming herself.
In stunning prose that draws from Puerto Rican folklore and mythology, a literary lineage of women writers of color, and narratives of identity, Figueroa presents a cultural coming-of-age story. Candid and raw, Mother Island gets to the heart of the question: Who do we become when we are no longer trying to be someone else?

Light in the Dark is the culmination of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's mature thought and the most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy. Focusing on aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, it contains several developments in her many important theoretical contributions.

The truly inspiring story of the first Latina Supreme Court Justice.

Outspoken, energetic, and fun, Sonia Sotomayor has managed to turn every struggle in life into a triumph. Born in the Bronx to immigrant parents from Puerto Rico, Sonia found out at age nine that she had diabetes, a serious illness now but an even more dangerous one fifty years ago. How did young Sonia handle the devastating news? She learned to give herself her daily insulin shots and became determined to make the most out of her life. It was the popular sixties TV show Perry Mason that made Sonia want to become a lawyer. Not only a lawyer, but a judge! Her remarkable career was capped in 2009 when President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court, only the third woman and first Hispanic justice in the court's history. Stories of Sotomayor's career are hardly dry legal stuff--she once hopped on a motorcycle to chase down counterfeiters and was the judge whose ruling ended the Major League baseball strike in 1995.

Powerful, poetic meditations on motherhood, sisterhood, spirituality, solidarity, displacement/gentrification, racism, and sexism.

Few milestones in human history are as momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. The fully revised textbook Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but informative new package, revealing how a new civilization and region - Latin America - emerged from that encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the African slaves they brought across the Atlantic, and to the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded. From the dawn of empires in the fifteenth century, through the conquest age of the sixteenth and to the end of empire in the nineteenth, the book combines broad brushstrokes with anecdotal details that bring the era to life. This new edition incorporates the newest scholarship on Spain, Portugal, and Atlantic Africa, in addition to Latin America itself, with indigenous and African views and women's experiences and contributions to colonial society highlighted throughout.

In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice. Calling for a politics of integrity that recognizes the complicated wholeness of individual and collective lives, Levins Morales delves among the interwoven roots of multiple oppressions, exposing connections, crafting strategies, and uncovering the wellsprings of resilience and joy. Throughout these twenty-eight essays-twenty-one of which are new or extensively revised-she exposes the structures and mechanisms that silence voices and divide movements. The result is a medicine bag full of techniques and perspectives to build a universal solidarity that is flexible, nuanced, and strong enough to fundamentally shift our world toward justice. Intimately personal and globally relevant, Medicine Stories brings clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.

LONGLISTED for the 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

An urgent, essential collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families, and other tales of high stakes journeys, from the MacArthur "genius" and award-winning author of War by Candlelight and At Night We Walk in Circles.

Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcón's hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. In "The Thousands," people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in "The Bridge." A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in "The Ballad of Rocky Rontal." And in the tour de force novella, "The Auroras", a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.

This delightful recipe in poem form shows us all, young and old, how to make a heartwarming, tummy-filling bean soup

From gathering the beans, onions and garlic to letting them swim in the pot until the house smells wonderful and it's time for supper.

A young boy helps his mother prepare a soup the whole family will enjoy using ingredients from Mother Earth. Onions are "yellow as the dawn," beans are like stars spread out on the "sky of the table" and the water in the pot is "as deep as a little lake." While the soup is cooking, the boy buries the cooking scraps under a tree in the yard "so Mother Earth keeps on growing flavors."

Simply written, yet full of vivid imagery, Jorge Argueta's verse and Rafael Yockteng's animated illustrations make preparing bean soup a fun, almost magical experience. This book is a great family recipe/poem for those who already love bean soup -- it is a comfort food for many -- and for those who are looking for a delicious new healthy food.

Key Text Features
recipe
procedural text

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.4
Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.5
Recognize common types of texts (e.g., storybooks, poems).

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.4
Describe how words and phrases (e.g., regular beats, alliteration, rhymes, repeated lines) supply rhythm and meaning in a story, poem, or song.

Born into a family of migrant workers, toiling in the fields by the age of six, Jose M. Hernàndez dreamed of traveling through the night skies on a rocket ship. Reaching for the Stars is the inspiring story of how he realized that dream, becoming the first Mexican-American astronaut.

Hernàndez didn't speak English till he was 12, and his peers often joined gangs, or skipped school. And yet, by his twenties he was part of an elite team helping develop technology for the early detection of breast cancer. He was turned down by NASA eleven times on his long journey to donning that famous orange space suit.

Hernàndez message of hard work, education, perseverance, of "reaching for the stars," makes this a classic American autobiography.

An exuberant picture book celebrating the life and legacy of Selena Quintanilla, beloved Queen of Tejano music.

From a very early age, young Selena knew how to connect with people and bring them together with music. Sing with Me follows Selena's rise to stardom, from front-lining her family's band at rodeos and quinceañeras to performing in front of tens of thousands at the Houston Astrodome. Young readers will be empowered by Selena's dedication--learning Spanish as a teenager, designing her own clothes, and traveling around the country with her family--sharing her pride in her Mexican-American roots and her love of music and fashion with the world.

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba fue escrita por Gabriel García Márquez durante su estancia en París, adonde había llegado como corresponsal de prensa y con la secreta intención de estudiar cine, a mediados de los años cincuenta.

El cierre del periódico para el que trabajaba le sumió en la pobreza, mientras redactaba en tres versiones distintas esta excepcional novela, que fue rechazada por varios editores antes de su publicación. Tras el barroquismo faulkneriano de La hojarasca, esta segunda novela supone un paso hacia la ascesis, hacia la economía expresiva, y el estilo del escritor se hace más puro y transparente. Se trata también de una historia de injusticia y violencia: un viejo coronel retirado va al puerto todos los viernes a esperar la llegada de la carta oficial que responda a la justa reclamación de sus derechos por los servicios prestados a la patria. Pero la patria permanece muda.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

The novel, written between 1956 and 1957 while living in Paris, and first published in 1961, is the story of an impoverished, retired colonel, a veteran of the Thousand Days' War, who still hopes to receive the pension he was promised some fifteen years earlier.

The colonel lives with his asthmatic wife in a small village under martial law. The action opens with the colonel preparing to go to the funeral of a town musician whose death is notable because he was the first to die from natural causes in many years.

The main characters of the novel are not named, adding to the feeling of insignificance of an individual living in Colombia. The colonel and his wife, who have lost their son to political repression, are struggling with poverty and financial instability. The corruption of the local and national officials is evident and this is a topic which García Márquez explores throughout the novel, by using references to censorship and the impact of government on society. The colonel desperately tries to sell their inheritance from their only son who is now dead and eventually the only reminder of his existence is a rooster that the colonel trains to take part in a cockfight.

Taking its title from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Leslie Sainz's Have You Been Long Enough at Table explores the personal and historical tragedies of the Cuban American experience through a distinctly feminine lens. Formally diverse with echoes of Spanish throughout, this debut collection critiques power and patriarchy as weaponized by the governments of the United States and the Republic of Cuba. In investigating the realities of displacement and inherited exile, Sainz honors her imagined past, present, and future as a result of the "revolution within the revolution"--the emancipation of Cuban women.

Through lyric and associative meditations, Sainz anatomizes the unique grief of immigrant daughters, as her speakers discover how family can be a microcosm of the very violence that displaced them. What emerges is a spiritual blueprint for disinheritance, radical self-determination, and the nuanced examinations of myth, ritual, and resistance.