Making up almost 30% of NYC’s population, the Latinx community is an integral part of the city. This Hispanic Heritage Month, we’re celebrating the richness of Latinx history, along with the very real issues many Latinx people face today. From a Cuban family drama to the streets of LA, join us on a journey through different facets of the diverse Latinx experience.
The House on G Street
A Cuban Family Saga
Lisandro Pérez
In The House on G Street, award-winning author Lisandro Pérez tells Cuba’s story through the lens of a single family: his own. The House on G Street is a unique depiction of one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century, the Cuban Revolution, told through generations of ancestors whose lives were shaped by dramatic historical forces. Pérez disentangles the complex history by following his family’s thread, imbuing political events with personal meaning. From a family’s emigration to Cuba to grandparents who met and fell in love one night in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Open Veins of Latin America
Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Eduardo Galeano Foreword by Isabel Allende
Published by Monthly Review Press
Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this classic text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation—the five veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent. This is perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.
Drawing Deportation
Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children
Silvia Rodriguez Vega
When children are the agents of their own stories, they can reimagine destructive situations in ways that adults sometimes cannot. Young immigrant children often do not have the words to express how their lives are shaped by issues of immigration, legal status, and state violence. Yet they are able to communicate its effects on them using art. Based on ten years of work with children in Arizona and California— and featuring an analysis of three hundred drawings, theater performances, and family interviews—Silvia Rodriguez Vega provides accounts of children’s challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations.
Uninsured in Chicago
How the Social Safety Net Leaves Latinos Behind
Robert Vargas
Around eleven million Latinx citizens around the country remain uninsured. Following the lives of forty uninsured Latinx people in Chicago, Robert Vargas explores the roots of this crisis, showing us why, despite their eligibility, Latinx people are the racial group least likely to enroll in health insurance. From excruciatingly long waits and expensive medical bills, to humiliating interactions with health navigators and emergency room staff, Vargas provides an up-close look at America’s broken healthcare system.
Brown and Gay in LA
The Lives of Immigrant Sons
Anthony Christian Ocampo
Compiling stories from gay men coming of age in Los Angeles, Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a person of color, and, ultimately, what it means to be an American.
