Go to A-Z Databases: eBooks to search for more eBooks.
Want more on finding books or eBooks? Try our How to Use Books & eBooks guides.
Afterlife by
A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020 A Most-Anticipated Book of the Year: O, The Oprah Magazine * The New York Times * The Washington Post *Vogue * Bustle * BuzzFeed * Ms. magazine * The Millions * Huffington Post * PopSugar * The Lily * Goodreads * Library Journal * LitHub * Electric Literature The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents "A stunning work of art that reminds readers Alvarez is, and always has been, in a class of her own." --Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Poet X Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves--lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack--but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including--maybe especially--members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?
Barrio Boy by
Journey with Ernesto Galarza through time, place, and culture in this stunning memoir of Mexican American identity and acculturation. Barrio Boy is the remarkable story of one boy's journey from a Mexican village so small its main street didn't have a name, to the barrio of Sacramento, California, bustling and thriving in the early decades of the twentieth century. With vivid imagery and a rare gift for re-creating a child's sense of time and place, Ernesto Galarza gives an account of the early experiences of his extraordinary life--from revolution in Mexico to segregation in the United States--that will continue to engage readers for generations to come. Since it was first published in 1971, Galarza's classic work has been assigned in high school and undergraduate classrooms across the country, profoundly affecting thousands of students who read this true story of acculturation into American life. The 40th anniversary edition of this best-selling book includes a new text design and cover, as well an introduction by Ilan Stavans, the distinguished cultural critic and editor of the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, which places Barrio Boy and Ernesto Galarza in historical context.
Bless Me, Ultima by
This coming-of-age classic and the bestselling Chicano novel of all time follows a young boy as he questions his faith and beliefs -- now one of PBS's "100 Great American Reads." Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past--a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world...and will nurture the birth of his soul. The winner of the 2015 National Humanities Medal, Rudolfo Anaya is acclaimed as the father of Chicano literature in English and for his rich and compassionate writing about the Mexican-American experience.
Borders by
In Borders, Pat Mora explores borders—political, cultural, social, emotional—that divide people, forming their individual identities while also challenging the very concept of society. As a poet who brings two cultures, two traditions, two languages and nations together, Mora brings a positive position to an otherwise divisive topic.
C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans by
The award-winning poet and author of A Place to Stand crafts provocative portraits of addiction and the Mexican American experience. Jimmy Santiago Baca's brilliantly received memoir, A Place to Stand, earned him the prestigious International Prize and offered a keyhole view into the brutal personal history that shaped--and continues to inform--his raw, incisive voice. A heart-stopping series of episodes about addiction, C-Train features Dream Boy, a young man who finds himself seduced, and later enslaved, by the siren song of cocaine. Part paean to the delicious power of intoxication, part lament for those helplessly under its power, C-Train is a ride its hero, and the reader, struggle to get off. In Thirteen Mexicans, Baca writes of the Chicano community and the gulf between the American dream and American reality. In searing, elegiac vignettes he portrays the raw beauty of life in the barrio and the surreal, stomach-turning moment when people of color must confront how they are reflected in the distorted mirror of white society. Giving voice to the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, Baca confirms his place as one of the nation's leading poets, whose words "heal, inspire, and elicit the earthly response of love" (Garrett Hongo). "[Baca] writes with . . . an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events." --Denise Levertov "[Baca] travels outward and inward as a Chicano in America, with all the complications that the identity entails. . . . [He is] a poet in control of his craft . . . whose voice, brutal yet tender, is unique in America." --The Nation
Chants by
El Paso, the pass to the north, lies between vast stretches of desert. This is a geographic accident. Yet like everywhere, people live, love, marry, grow old and die. They also rejoice and despair. These poems relate all these experiences—but in the magical presence, the telluric force, of the desert. Two women poets sing here, one in the guise of the desert, the other in the figure of Pat Mora. Together they intone Chants.
The desert's beauty is perceived in subtle gradations of color and texture, in stark contrasts between light and darkness. It speaks as a magical force, as a lonely woman and, for our patience, offers flowers. Like the desert, Pat Mora speaks with muted tones, weaves incantations; she invests her poetic space with magical figures, yet from her loneliness come as well fear, resentment and despair. But she learns the peaceful solitude of the desert. From their dialogue, words become blossoms, fragile in desert rhythms.
Communion by
This third collection of poetry by Pat Mora provides a healing voice, additional depth and maturity, and an international perspective in considering the art of poetry itself, male and female relationship, separation from children, homeland and tradition.
Encantado by
Inspired by Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology and Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Pat Mora brings us the poetic monologues of Encantado, an imagined southwestern town. Each poem forms a story that reveals the complex and emotional journeys we take through life. Mora meanders through the thoughts of Encantado's residents--the mothers and sisters, brothers and fathers in whom we see slivers of ourselves and our loved ones--and paints a portrait of a community through its inhabitants' own diverse voices. Even the river has a voice we understand. Inspired by both the real and imagined stories around her, Mora transports us to the heart of what it means to join in a chorus of voices. A community. A town. Encantado.
House of Houses by
Combining poetic language and the traditions of magic realism to paint a vivid portrait of her family, Pat Mora's House of Houses is an unconventional memoir that reads as if every member, death notwithstanding, is in one room talking, laughing, and crying. In a salute to the Day of the Dead, the story begins with a visit to the cemetery in which all of her deceased relatives come alive to share stories of the family, literally bringing the food to their own funerals. From there the book covers a year in the life of her clan, revealing the personalities and events that Mora herself so desperately yearns to know and understand.
The House on Mango Street by
The bestselling coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world from the winner of the 2018 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous-Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
Hunger of Memory The Education of Richard Rodriguez by
Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum.
Here is the poignant journey of a “minority student” who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation — from his past, his parents, his culture — and so describes the high price of “making it” in middle-class America.
Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language ... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.
The Importance of a Piece of Paper by
"In Jimmy Santiago Baca's haunting story collection, intricate family dramas . . . play out against the luminous, wide-open backdrop of New Mexico." --Los Angeles Times In his first foray into short fiction, award-winning poet and memoirist Jimmy Santiago Baca explores the territory where old-world traditions meet new-world ambitions, and characters try to make something of themselves, while keeping their souls intact. In "Matilda's Garden," an old farmer pines for his wife of fifty years who died in her sleep one-night months before. He is lured to the garden in the middle of the night by what he thinks is her presence, only to meet a gruesome fate. In "The Importance of a Piece of Paper," two siblings must face the brother who has betrayed them by selling his share of the family land, leaving an entire community vulnerable. In "The Three Sons of Julia," a long-suffering mother whose one request is that all her sons come home for the Fourth of July, watches her dream burst as two of her sons--one a successful businessman and the other a hard-drinking ex-con--nearly destroy her house, and each other. Merging a refreshing innocence with a profound understanding of the world's brutality, The Importance of a Piece of Paper is a daring and arresting work that is at once fearless, tender, and inspiring. "[Baca] continues to mine his experience, exploring conflicts between the rich traditions of Chicano culture and a modern world impatient with them." --Entertainment Weekly "Inspirational, tragic, and redeeming . . . Baca provides moving poetic imagery and unleashes his gift for finely crafted sensory detail." --Rocky Mountain News
In the Time of the Butterflies by
25th Anniversary Edition "A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time." --St. Petersburg Times It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas--the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression.
Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by
In Magical/Realism, poet and essayist Vanessa Angelica Villarreal intimately and fearlessly explores the many complicated girlhoods of being a working-class, first-generation, Mexican American daughter of a cumbia musician. She loved grunge and hated Selena. She found refuge in 80s fantasy movies and in the half-acre of swampy pines behind her Houston home. And she navigated a country that never really saw her - or her family's - value beyond their labour. These essays sharply weave together memoir with explorations of race, class, and gender, using music and pop culture as their axis. In one essay, Vanessa writes about Nirvana's impact on her life as an outcast; in another she looks critically at the Latina body as a site of trouble and all that gets projected onto it. In 'When We All Loved a Show About a Wall,' Vanessa provides a crucial reading of Game of Thrones, showing its radical political commentaries on borders, asylum, migrant rights, and ICE. And in 'The Fantasy of Healing,' she connects her own divorce and trauma to the video game The Witcher. With Magical/Realism, Vanessa recovers the truth from the absences and silences of migration, colonialism, and white supremacy. She looks closely at music as a stand-in for the archive of the undocumented and how pop culture leaves objects behind as portals for memory. This is a wise, tender, expansive collection from a dazzling, essential voice.
Man of Fire : Selected Writings of Ernesto Galarza by
Activist, labor scholar, and organizer Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984) was a leading advocate for Mexican Americans and one of the most important Mexican American scholars and activists after World War II. This volume gathers Galarza's key writings, reflecting an intellectual rigor, conceptual clarity, and a constructive concern for the working class in the face of America's growing influence over Mexico's economic system. Throughout his life, Galarza confronted and analyzed some of the most momentous social transformations of the twentieth century. Inspired by his youthful experience as a farm laborer in Sacramento, he dedicated his life to the struggle for justice for farm workers and urban working-class Latinos and helped build the first multiracial farm workers union, setting the foundation for the emergence of the United Farm Workers Union. He worked to change existing educational philosophies and curricula in schools, and his civil rights legacy includes the founding of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). In 1979, Galarza was the first U.S. Latino to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for works such as Strangers in Our Fields, Merchants of Labor, Barrio Boy, and Tragedy at Chualar.
The Moths and Other Stories / Las Palomillas de la Noche y Otros Relatos by
The adolescent protagonist of the title story, like other girls in this pioneering collection, rebels against her father, refusing to go to Mass. Instead, dressed in her black Easter shoes and carrying her missal and veil, she goes to her abuelita's house. Her grandmother has always accepted her for who she is and has provided a safe refuge from the anger and violence at home. The eight haunting stories included in this collection explore the social, economic and cultural impositions that shape women's lives. Girls on the threshold of puberty rebel against their fathers, struggle to understand their sexuality and, in two stories, deal with the ramifications of pregnancy. Other women struggle against the limitations of marriage and the Catholic religion, which seek to keep them subservient to the men in their lives. Prejudice and the social and economic status of Chicanos often form the backdrop as women fight-with varying degrees of success-to break free from oppression.Shedding light on the complex lives and experiences of Mexican-American girls and women, this bilingual edition containing the first-ever Spanish translation of Viramontes' debut collection, The Moths and Other Stories, will make this landmark work available to a wider audience.
No Enemies by
Award-winning poet Jimmy Santiago Baca returns with another impassioned collection about social issues, including racial injustice, greed and abuse of power by politicians and police.
An Organizer's Tale: Speeches by
The first major collection of writings by civil rights leader Cesar Chavez One of the most important civil rights leaders in American history, Cesar Chavez was a firm believer in the principles of nonviolence, and he effectively employed peaceful tactics to further his cause. Through his efforts, he helped achieve dignity, fair wages, benefits, and humane working conditions for hundreds of thousands of farm workers. This extensive collection of Chavez's speeches and writings chronicles his progression and development as a leader, and includes previously unpublished material. From speeches to spread the word of the Delano Grape Strike to testimony before the House of Representatives about the hazards of pesticides, Chavez communicated in clear, direct language and motivated people everywhere with an unflagging commitment to his ideals. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.
This Bridge Called My Back Fortie Hb by
Fortieth anniversary edition of the foundational text of women of color feminism. Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities-race, class, gender, and sexuality-systemic to women of color oppression and liberation." Reissued here, forty years after its inception, this anniversary edition contains a new preface by Moraga reflecting on Bridge's "living legacy" and the broader community of women of color activists, writers, and artists whose enduring contributions dovetail with its radical vision. Further features help set the volume's historical context, including an extended introduction by Moraga from the 2015 edition, a statement written by Gloria Anzaldúa in 1983, and visual art produced during the same period by Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Yolanda López, and others, curated by their contemporary, artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez. Bridge continues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world.
Under the Feet of Jesus by
A moving and powerful novel about the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions as migrant workers in California's fields. "Viramontes depicts this world with sensuous physicality...working firmly in the social-realist vein of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle."--Publishers Weekly At the center of this powerful tale is Estrella, a girl about to cross the perilous border to womanhood. What she knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment by her husband in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the farms that feed its people. But within Estrella, seeds of growth and change are stirring. And in the arms of Alejo, they burst into a full, fierce flower as she tastes the joy and pain of first love. Pushed to the margins of society, she learns to fight back and is able to help the young farmworker she loves when his ambitions and very life are threatened in a harvest of death. Infused with the beauty of the California landscape and shifting splendors of the passing seasons juxtaposed with the bleakness of poverty, this vividly imagined novel is worthy of the people it celebrates and whose story it tells so magnificently. The simple lyrical beauty of Viramontes' prose, her haunting use of image and metaphor, and the urgency of her themes all announce Under the Feet of Jesus as a landmark work of American fiction. Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature Selected as the Univesity of Oregon's 2019 Common Reading book
When I Walk Through That Door, I Am An Immigrant Mother's Quest by
0 of 0 copies available
Unavailable
Add to history
Description
Details
Reviews
Poet-activist Jimmy Baca immerses the reader in an epic narrative poem, imagining the experience of motherhood in the context of immigration, family separation, and ICE raids on the Southern border.
Woman of Light by
Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.
Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love—filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.
Go to OneSearch to search for more print books.
Want more on finding print books? Try our How to Use OneSearch guide.
Man of Fire by
Activist, labor scholar, and organizer Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984) was a leading advocate for Mexican Americans and one of the most important Mexican American scholars and activists after World War II. This volume gathers Galarza's key writings, reflecting an intellectual rigor, conceptual clarity, and a constructive concern for the working class in the face of America's growing influence over Mexico's economic system.
Borderlands / la Frontera by
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. LGBT Studies. Fourth Edition. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new introduction by scholars Norma Cantú (University of Texas at San Antonio) and Aída Hurtado (University of California at Santa Cruz) as well as a revised critical bibliography. "The emotional and intellectual impact of the book is disorienting and powerful...all languages are spoken, and survival depends on understanding all modes of thought. In the borderlands new creatures come into being. Anzaldúa celebrates this 'new mestiza' in bold, experimental writing."--The Village Voice "Anzaldúa's pulsating weaving of innovative poetry with sparse informative prose brings us deep into the insider/outsider consciousness of the borderlands; that ancient and contemporary, crashing and blending world that divides and unites America."--Women's Review of Books
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by
Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters-Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia-arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost-and what they find-is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel from one of the premiere novelists of our time.
In the Time of the Butterflies by
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas--"The Butterflies."
The Devil's Highway by
A widely-praised piece of investigative reporting examining the journey of 26 men who in May 2001 attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of Southern Arizona through the region known as the Devil's Highway.
Bordering Fires : The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano by
As the descendants of Mexican immigrants have settled throughout the United States, a great literature has emerged, but its correspondances with the literature of Mexico have gone largely unobserved. In Bordering Fires, the first anthology to combine writing from both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border, Cristina Garcia presents a richly diverse cross-cultural conversation.
Hecho en Tejas : An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature by
Once an independent nation, Texas has always been proud of its unique culture. The literature of the Lone Star State has long attracted local, regional, and national audiences and critics, yet the state's Mexican American voices have yet to receive the attention they deserve.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America by
In his dazzling new memoir, Richard Rodriguez reflects on the color brown and the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America today. Rodriguez argues that America has been brown since its inception-since the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye.
The Anaya Reader by
Novel excerpts. Bless me, Ultima -- Tortuga -- Alburquerque -- Zia summer -- Short stories. B. Traven is alive and well in Cuernavaca -- The apple orchard -- The silence of the llano -- The gift -- In search of Epifano -- Children of the desert -- The man who found a pistol -- Devil deer -- Message from the Inca -- Essays. Requiem for a lowrider -- The magic of words -- A New Mexico Christmas -- An American Chicano in King Arthur's court, from A Chicano in China -- At a crossroads -- Mythical dimensions/political reality -- The New World Man -- Aztlan -- Take the tortillas out of your poetry -- On the education of Hispanic children -- The censorship of neglect -- La Llorona, El Kookooee, and sexuality -- Bendiceme, America -- Plays and poems. Who killed Don Jose? -- Billy the Kid -- "Walt Whitman strides the Ilano of New Mexico".
Bless Me, Ultima : A Novel by
When a curandera comes to stay with a young boy, he tests the bonds that tie him to his culture and finds himself in the secrets of the past.
© 2024 COM Library
1200 Amburn Road, Texas City, Texas 77591
409-933-8448 . FAX 409-933-8030
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
