Featured Books and DVDs: Latinx Heritage Month 

Each year, the Penn community celebrates Latinx Heritage Month with activities led by La Casa Latina. With this year’s festivities already under way, a highlight looks to be a panel discussion about advocacy and Latino voices in politics featuring Luis A. Miranda Jr., author of Relentless: My Story of the Latino Spirit that is Transforming America (which has a forward from his son, Lin-Manuel Miranda). Although books will be available for purchase at the event, Miranda’s work can also be borrowed from the Penn Libraries! 

Of course this is just one of the Libraries’ many great offerings for those who want to learn more about Latinx heritage and experiences. Check out just a few of our recommended books and DVDs for Latinx Heritage Month below. You can find the selections highlighted below, and many more, on display on the first floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, next to New Books. 

Note: The descriptions below are collected from publishers and edited for brevity and clarity. 

Books 

A Latino Memoir: Exploring Identity, Family and the Common Good by Gerald Poyo 

Transnationalism has shaped the life and identity of history professor Gerald Poyo. In this wide-ranging examination of his relatives’ migrations in the Western Hemisphere—the Americas—over five generations, Poyo uses his training as a historian to unearth his family’s stories. Beginning with his great-great grandfather’s flight from Cuba to Key West in 1869, this is also about the loss of a beloved homeland. 

Divided into two parts, the first section of a thought-provoking memoir traces Poyo’s parents and ancestors as he links their stories to impersonal movements in the world—Spanish colonialism, Cuban nationalism, United States expansionism—that influenced their lives. The second half explores how exile, migration and growing up a “hemispheric American, a borderless American” impacted his own development and stimulated questions about poverty, religion, and relations between Latin America and the United States. Poyo emphasizes the universal desire for a safe, stable life for one’s family.

Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas: Remembering Xicana Indígena Ancestries by Susy J. Zepeda

Susy J. Zepeda highlights the often overlooked yet intertwined legacies of Chicana feminisms and queer decolonial theory through the work of select queer Indígena cultural producers and thinkers. By tracing the ancestries and silences of gender-nonconforming people of color, she addresses colonial forms of epistemic violence and methods of transformation, in particular spirit research. Zepeda also uses archival materials, raised ceremonial altars, and analysis of decolonial artwork in conjunction with oral histories to explore the matriarchal roots of Chicana/x and Latina/x feminisms. As she shows, these feminisms are forms of knowledge that people can remember through Indigenous-centered visual narratives, cultural wisdom, and spirit practices.

A fascinating exploration of hidden Indígena histories and silences, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas blends scholarship with spirit practices to reimagine the root work, dis/connection to land, and the political decolonization of Xicana/x peoples.

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz 

In this moving and ambitious novel, Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of 12 sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs; her alternately biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela; her struggles with debt, gentrification, and loss; and, eventually, what really happened between her and her estranged son, Fernando. As Cara confronts her darkest secrets and regrets, we see a woman buffeted by life but still full of fight.

The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States by John Storm Roberts

The Tejano superstar Selena and the tango revival both in the dance clubs and on Broadway are only the most obvious symptoms of how central Latin music is to American musical life. With the first edition of The Latin Tinge, John Storm Roberts offered revolutionary insight into the enormous importance of Latin influences in U.S. popular music of all kinds. Now, in this revised second edition, Roberts updates the history of Latin American influences on the American music scene over the last 20 years. With an update on the jazz scene and the careers of legendary musicians as well as newer bands on the circuit, the second edition of The Latin Tinge sheds new light on a rich and complex subject: the crucial contribution that Latin rhythms are making to our uniquely American idiom.

Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration by Alejandra Oliva

In this powerful and deeply felt memoir of translation, storytelling, and borders, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a powerful chronical of her experience interpreting at the U.S.-Mexico border. In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration, looking at how language and opportunity move through each of them: from the river as the waterway that separates the U.S. and Mexico, to the table as the place over which Oliva prepares asylum seekers for their interviews, and finally, to the wall as the behemoth imposition that runs along America’s southernmost border.

With lush prose and perceptive insight, Oliva encourages readers to approach the painful questions that this crisis poses with equal parts critique and compassion. Oliva argues for a better world while guiding us through the suffering that makes the fight necessary and the joy that makes it worth fighting for.

DVDs

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Based on Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s YA novel, the film centers on a friendship between two teenage Mexican-American loners. In 1987 at a swimming pool in El Paso, Aristotle Mendoza and Dante Quintana become instant friends. As they grow up, Ari and Dante explore their friendship while struggling with racial and ethnic identity, sexuality and family relationships. But when Dante wants friendship to turn into romance, the conflicted Ari recoils. This beautiful, multilayered exploration of first love and self-acceptance casts a beguiling spell.

Valvula de escape - Stories of the Puerto Rican Diaspora

This 10-part documentary series presents the history of the centennial exodus of the Puerto Rican people to the United States. To address the economic pressures and deficiencies caused by the colonial relationship, a migratory “escape valve” was instituted between the United States and Puerto Rico. This valve maintains the social peace and “stability” challenged by the pressures of unemployment, political unrest, fear, hostility, and poverty.

Puerto Rico created an addiction to emigration, whose cost has been a high dependency on the movement of its population. This series explores several questions as: how has this migration been handled and implemented at different times? What answers have been officially given? What are the causes, consequences and circumstances?

In English and Spanish with subtitles in English or Spanish.

Living Los Sures

Diego Echeverria’s film skillfully represents the challenges residents of Brooklyn’s Southside faced: poverty, drugs, gang violence, crime, abandoned real estate, racial tension, single-parent homes, and inadequate local resources. The complex portrait also celebrates the vitality of this largely Puerto Rican and Dominican community, showing the strength of their culture, their creativity, and their determination to overcome a desperate situation. Beautifully restored for the 30th anniversary premiere at the New York Film Festival, this documentary is an invaluable piece of New York City history.

Machete 

From director Robert Rodriguez comes an action- packed, cutting-edge serving of carnage asada...with killer deleted scenes! Set up, double-crossed and left for dead, Machete, played by Danny Trejo, is an ass-kicking ex-Federale who lays waste to anything that gets in his path. As he takes on hitmen, vigilantes, and a ruthless drug cartel, bullets fly, blades clash and the body count rises. Any way you slice it, vengeance has a new name: Machete.

María Irene Fornés: The Rest I Make Up

When renowned playwright María Irene Fornés stops writing due to dementia, her friendship with a young filmmaker begins a new artistic practice. Made over a decade, The Rest I Make Up is an intimate and collaborative documentary about a visionary artist who lived and wrote outside convention, and a tender story about memory, aging, queer intergenerational friendship, and joyful presence.

In English with some Spanish; occasional subtitles in English accompany some English and some Spanish dialogue.