Download or read book Our Migrant Souls written by Héctor Tobar and published by MCD. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new book by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity. In Our Migrant Souls, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now. “Latino” is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States, and also one of the most rapidly growing. Composed as a direct address to the young people who identify or have been classified as “Latino,” Our Migrant Souls is the first account of the historical and social forces that define Latino identity. Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, and pop culture, Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of “Latino” as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and gives voice to the anger and the hopes of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes and who have faced insult and division—a story as old as this country itself. Tobar translates his experience as not only a journalist and novelist but also a mentor, a leader, and an educator. He interweaves his own story, and that of his parents’ migration to the United States from Guatemala, into his account of his journey across the country to uncover something expansive, inspiring, true, and alive about the meaning of “Latino” in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The Last Great Road Bum written by Héctor Tobar and published by MCD. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Los Angeles Times Top 10 California Books of 2020. One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Fiction Books from 2020. Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Joyce Carol Oates prize. One of Exile in Bookville’s Favorite Books of 2020. In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a “road bum,” an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum. A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson’s freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador—a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism. The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live—a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off.
Download or read book Migrant Souls written by Arturo Islas and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Excerpt from Migrant Souls written by Arturo Islas and published by . This book was released on 199? with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Translation Nation written by Héctor Tobar and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the smash hit Deep Down Dark, a definitive tour of the Spanish-speaking United States—a parallel nation, 35 million strong, that is changing the very notion of what it means to be an American in unprecedented and unexpected ways. Tobar begins on familiar terrain, in his native Los Angeles, with his family's story, along with that of two brothers of Mexican origin with very different interpretations of Americanismo, or American identity as seen through a Latin American lens—one headed for U.S. citizenship and the other for the wrong side of the law and the south side of the border. But this is just a jumping-off point. Soon we are in Dalton, Georgia, the most Spanish-speaking town in the Deep South, and in Rupert, Idaho, where the most popular radio DJ is known as "El Chupacabras." By the end of the book, we have traveled from the geographical extremes into the heartland, exploring the familiar complexities of Cuban Miami and the brand-new ones of a busy Omaha INS station. Sophisticated, provocative, and deeply human, Translation Nation uncovers the ways that Hispanic Americans are forging new identities, redefining the experience of the American immigrant, and reinventing the American community. It is a book that rises, brilliantly, to meet one of the most profound shifts in American identity.
Download or read book Diaspora Online written by Ruxandra Trandafoiu and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, millions of Romanians emigrated in search of work and new experiences; they became engaged in an interrogation of what it meant to be Romanian in a united Europe and the globalized world. Their thoughts, feelings and hopes soon began to populate the virtual world of digital and mobile technologies. This book chronicles the online cultural and political expressions of the Romanian diaspora using websites based in Europe and North America. Through online exchanges, Romanians perform new types of citizenship, articulated from the margins of the political field. The politicization of their diasporic condition is manifested through written and public protests against discriminatory work legislation, mobilization, lobbying, cultural promotion and setting up associations and political parties that are proof of the gradual institutionalization of informal communications. Online discourse analysis, supplemented by interviews with migrants, poets and politicians involved in the process of defining new diasporic identities, provide the basis of this book, which defines the new cultural and political practices of the Romanian diaspora.
Download or read book The Barbarian Nurseries written by Héctor Tobar and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Boston Globe Best Fiction Book of 2011 The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions. Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you'd never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn't hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she's never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . . With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
Download or read book The Rain God written by Arturo Islas and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Rain God is a lost masterpiece that helped launch a legion of writers. Its return, in times like these, is a plot twist that perhaps only Arturo Islas himself could have conjured. May it win many new readers." — Luis Alberto Urrea, bestselling author of The House of Broken Angels and The Hummingbird’s Daughter "Rivers, rivulets, fountains and waters flow, but never return to their joyful beginnings; anxiously they hasten on to the vast realms of the Rain God." A beloved Southwestern classic—as beautiful, subtle and profound as the desert itself—Arturo Islas's The Rain God is a breathtaking masterwork of contemporary literature. Set in a fictional small town on the Texas-Mexico border, it tells the funny, sad and quietly outrageous saga of the children and grandchildren of Mama Chona the indomitable matriarch of the Angel clan who fled the bullets and blood of the 1911 revolution for a gringo land of promise. In bold creative strokes, Islas paints on unforgettable family portrait of souls haunted by ghosts and madness--sinners torn by loves, lusts and dangerous desires. From gentle hearts plagued by violence and epic delusions to a child who con foretell the coming of rain in the sweet scent of angels, here is a rich and poignant tale of outcasts struggling to live and die with dignity . . . and to hold onto their past while embracing an unsteady future.
Download or read book The Tattooed Soldier written by Héctor Tobar and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Bernal is a Guatemalan refugee in Los Angeles haunted by memories of his wife and child, who were murdered at the hands of a man marked with yellow ink. In a park near Antonio's apartment, Guillermo Longoria extends his arm and reveals a sinister tattoo—yellow pelt, black spots, red mouth. It is the sign of the death squad, the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army. This chance encounter between Antonio and his family's killer ignites a psychological showdown between these two men. Each will discover that the war in Central America has migrated with them as they are engulfed by the quemazones—"the great burning" of the Los Angeles riots. A tragic tale of loss and destiny in the underbelly of an American city, The Tattooed Soldier is Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Héctor Tobar's mesmerizing exploration of violence and the marks it leaves upon us.
Download or read book The Warmth of Other Suns written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
Download or read book Moving Matters written by Susan Ossman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving Matters is a richly nuanced portrait of the serial migrant: a person who has lived in several countries, calling each one at some point "home." The stories told here are both extraordinary and increasingly common. Serial migrants rarely travel freely—they must negotiate a world of territorial borders and legal restrictions—yet as they move from one country to another, they can use border-crossings as moments of self-clarification. They often become masters of settlement as they turn each country into a life chapter. Susan Ossman follows this diverse and growing population not only to understand how paths of serial movement produce certain ways of life, but also to illuminate an ongoing tension between global fluidity and the power of nation-states. Ultimately, her lyrical reflection on migration and social diversity offers an illustration of how taking mobility as a starting point fundamentally alters our understanding of subjectivity, politics, and social life.
Download or read book Braceros written by Deborah Cohen and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In Braceros, Deborah Cohen asks why these migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen creatively links the often-unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.
Download or read book Inter State written by José Vadi and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "must read" debut collection of poetic, linked essays investigating the past and present state of California, its conflicting histories and their impact on a writer's family and life (Los Angeles Times). California has been advertised as a destiny manifested for those ready to pull up their bootstraps and head west across to find wealth on the other side of the Sierra Nevada since the 19th century. Across the seven essays in the debut collection by José Vadi, we hear from the descendants of those not promised that prize. Inter State explores California through many lenses: an aging obsessed skateboarder; a self-appointed dive bar DJ; a laid-off San Francisco tech worker turned rehired contractor; a grandson of Mexican farmworkers pursuing the crops they tilled. Amidst wildfires, high speed rail, housing crises, unprecedented wealth and its underlying decay, Inter State excavates and roots itself inside those necessary stories and places lost in the ever-changing definitions of a selectively golden state.
Download or read book On Migration written by Ruth Padel and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Life began with migration." In a magnificent tapestry of life on the move, Ruth Padel weaves poems and prose, science and religion, wild nature and human history, to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. "We're all from somewhere else," she begins. "Migration builds civilization but also causes displacement." From the Holy Family's Flight into Egypt, the Lost Colony on Roanoke, and the famous photograph 'Migrant Mother', Padel turns to John James Audubon's journey from Haiti and France, heirlooms carried through Ellis Island, Kennedy's "society of immigrants" and Casa del Migrante on the Mexican border. But she reaches the human story through the millennia–old journeys of cells in our bodies, trees in the Ice Age, Monarch butterflies travelling from Alaska to Mexico. As warblers battle hurricanes over the Caribbean and wildebeest brave a river filled with the largest crocodiles in Africa, she shows that the truest purpose of migration for both humans and animals is survival.
Download or read book Continental Divide written by Krista Schlyer and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topic of the border wall between the United States and Mexico continues to be broadly and hotly debated: on national news media, by local and state governments, and even over the dinner table. By now, broad segments of the population have heard widely varying opinions about the wall's effect on illegal immigration, international politics, and the drug war. But what about the wall's effect on animals? Krista Schlyer vividly shows us that this largely isolated natural area, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, is also host to a number of rare ecosystems.
Download or read book Migrant Soul written by Avi Shafran and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autobiography of a descendant of full-blooded American Indians who marries an assimilated Jewess and then begins an amazing journey.
Download or read book The Right to Stay Home written by David Bacon and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the growing resistance of Mexican communities to the poverty that forces people to migrate to the United States People across Mexico are being forced into migration, and while 11 percent of that country’s population lives north of the US border, the decision to migrate is rarely voluntary. Free trade agreements and economic policies that exacerbate and reinforce extreme wealth disparities make it impossible for Mexicans to make a living at home. And yet when they migrate to the United States, they must grapple with criminalization, low wages, and exploitation. In The Right to Stay Home, journalist David Bacon tells the story of the growing resistance of Mexican communities. Bacon shows how immigrant communities are fighting back—envisioning a world in which migration isn’t forced by poverty or environmental destruction and people are guaranteed the “right to stay home.” This richly detailed and comprehensive portrait of immigration reveals how the interconnected web of labor, migration, and the global economy unites farmers, migrant workers, and union organizers across borders. In addition to incisive reporting, eleven narratives are included, giving readers the chance to hear the voices of activists themselves as they reflect on their experiences, analyze the complexities of their realities, and affirm their vision for a better world.
