Latinx Heritage Month Reading List

October 10, 2023

To celebrate Latinx Heritage Month, we're delighted to share an annotated reading list compiled by students of the UC Berkeley English Department. Professor John Alba Cutler, along with a group of both undergraduate and graduate students in our department, collaborated to produce a reading list ranging from novels in verse to memoirs, short story collections and poetry. Below are recommendations from Professor John Alba Cutler and students Jennifer Arellano, Mitch Christensen, Fabian Mendoza, Carli Torres, Victor Solorzano-Gringeri, Anna Sanchez, Maura Adela Cruz and Miguel Samano. We thank all these students for their contributions to the English Department and the broader UC Berkeley community.

Please see here for the UC Berkeley Division of Equity and Inclusion's message regarding the celebration of Latinx Heritage Month and Latinx History on the UC Berkeley campus.

The Story of My Teeth

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

Gustavo “Highway” Sanchez, a charismatic auctioneer, tells the story of his teeth in Luiselli’s playful and unconventional novel— written in collaboration with the workers of a Jumex factory in Ecatepec, Mexico. In it, Highway replaces his unsightly teeth with those of Marilyn Monroe and holds an auction for his old set, during which he charmingly shows off his skill of elegantly “surpassing the truth,” claiming his teeth to have belonged to the likes of Virginia Woolf and Petrarch. This shared vision of a novel explores the intersectional relationship between narrative, truth, and fiction.

Recommended by Jennifer Arellano

Solito

Solito by Javier Zamora

Javier Zamora's Solito (2022) details the experiences of his migration from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. In this memoir, readers will experience the migration/crossing narrative, the border, coyotes, and la Migra from a childhood perspective at the turn of the 21st century, which echoes the experiences of child refugees from the (on-going) Child Migrant Crisis of 2014.

Recommended by Mitch Christensen

The Carrying: Poems

The Carrying by Ada Limón

Ada Limón’s The Carrying explores infertility and womanhood in poems of exceptional clarity. Currently serving a second consecutive term as US Poet Laureate, Limón has published six volumes of poetry, all of them excellent, but this is my favorite.

Recommended by Professor John Alba Cutler

The Distance Between Us

The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande

The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande is vivid and raw as it narrates the harrowing experience of a childhood torn between the United States and Mexico. Grande does an incredible job of narrativizing a painful memory for many Latine immigrants, especially those who had to migrate at a young age.

Recommended by Fabian Mendoza

Night at the Fiestas

Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade

The stories in Kirsten Valdez Quade's short story collection Night at the Fiestas all focus on girlhood in New Mexico. The writing is stylistically tight and psychologically perceptive, which works well at conveying the visceral awkwardness of the situations in which her protagonists find themselves. I haven't read much contemporary Latinx writing set in New Mexico, so it stuck out.

Recommended by Miguel Samano

Bless Me, Ultima and A Place to Stand

A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca and Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

The two books I recommend are A Place to Stand, an autobiography by Jimmy Santiago Baca and Bless Me Ultima, a novel by Rudolfo Anaya. I consider both of these wonderful books to be classic titles of Chicano Literature and two of my all time favorite books. “A Place to Stand traces Baca's life journey from his difficult upbringing to his imprisonment and eventual development into a renowned poet and writer.

Bless Me, Ultima is a moving novel highlighting the difficulties of cultural and personal identities. It focuses on how tradition and modernity interact in a world that is constantly changing.

Recommended by Anna Sanchez

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez

In the course of ten essays beginning with adult maturity and ending with boyhood, Richard Rodriguez traces the contours of a life lived in Mexican California. Having celebrated his entrance into the American cultural mainstream by means of education and English language acquisition in the earlier work Hunger of Memory, which includes a retrospective of his time in UC Berkeley’s English PhD program, Rodriguez, in this later volume, allows cracks to form in his assimilated veneer. Days of Obligation by no means reverses his stances against bilingual education and affirmative action, and indeed his writing remains, in places, infuriating, even dangerous. Yet a keen sense of the vexed and often painful problem of living with the memory of various pasts that refuse their designation as such emerges through Rodriguez’s beautiful prose; of particular interest is “Late Victorians,” Rodriguez’s haunting meditation on the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, a piece of writing no one living in the Bay Area should miss.

Recommended by Victor Solorzano-Gringeri

Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse

Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

This book is fun, feminine, inventive, and sincere. The novel explores racialized womanhood and the grief that comes with growing up, but not without first resurrecting the beloved and iconic Selena Quintanilla. It's bizarre in the best way, leaving you stunned while also helping you find peace with your own loneliness.

Recommended by Carli Torres

The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems

The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems by Natalia Toledo Paz

Contemporary Zapotec poet, Natalia Toledo Paz is an award-winning Indigenous Zapotec poet from Juchitan, Oaxaca, Mexico. Her poetry collection, The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems," beautifully documents daily Isthmus Zapotec life and language with striking imagery and palpable sentiments of love for her Isthmus Zapotec customs and community. Her work powerfully resists assimilation into the dominant Mexican settler-colonial society, declaring a stern refusal "to die from absence," and gives testament to the continual presence of Zapotec peoples and our mother languages within so-called Latin America.

Recommended by Maura Adela Cruz