Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month: Influential Latinx Authors and Titles
From September 15 to October 15, we celebrate the Latinx culture and community—deservedly so. As a proud Mexican woman, immersing myself in the creative aspects of this month has been wonderful. I come from a blended family and was not given the opportunities to learn my language, food, and cultural identity as a kid. As an adult, I have taken every chance to dig into my Latina side. Now, working in publishing, I get to go one step further and elevate Latinx authors and their stories. As I was looking into what to read this month, I found some titles written by amazing authors that I think everyone should read.
This coming-of-age novel follows four girls who have been moved out of their home in the Dominican Republic to New York in 1960. As the story progresses, the girls adapt to their new home and try to reconcile the loss of their old life with the gain of a new one.
Julia Alvarez was born in the Dominican Republic herself and also moved to New York. She is an award-winning poet and novelist holding the Pura Belpré Award for writing. Julia wrote from her perspective of an immigrant’s experience in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and in her novel In the Time of the Butterflies. She writes about identity, cultural division, and navigating different worlds.
The story follows Juan Preciado on a journey to a haunted town to find his father, only to find out from the spiritual inhabitants that his father was central to the town's happenings. It explores the Mexican culture’s spirituality and its beliefs in the afterlife. When it was first published in 1955, the novel was met with criticism and only sold 2,000 copies. Now, it has been translated into more than thirty different languages.
Juan Rulfo was a Mexican author and screenwriter who penned only one novel that then became a classic translated piece of literature in classrooms. He influenced many Latinx authors as he pioneered magical realism in Latin American literature.
The debut novel by Isabel Allende follows the lives of four generations of one family, the Truebas, with the political backdrop of Chile in the twentieth century. The story blends love, magical realism, and political turmoil. An instant bestseller, it was originally published in Spanish before being translated into many other languages and used in classrooms as part of English literature curriculums.
Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American author who is renowned in the Latinx community for her work and celebrated in the literary world. She has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she received Chile’s National Literature Prize, and she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Allende’s novels are mostly based on her personal experiences, blending magical realism and myths while paying tribute to women's lives.
Published by Tin House, a small local press here in Portland, this debut novel explores grief, identity, and belonging. Follow Daniel de la Luna at university as he grieves the loss of his uncle and learns to bear the weight of it while exploring the changing relationships with his roommate and himself.
André N. Ordorica is a queer, Latinx writer and educator drawing on his family's story and his own cultural upbringing. While addressing themes of queerness and concepts of belonging, he advocates for more opportunities to be presented for marginalized communities.
These books stood out to me because all authors were pioneers in the Latin American literature community. What I love most about my culture is the folklore—the magic that surrounds it and the people within it, and the way it’s so interwoven with our identity. These authors used their identities to catapult the Latinx culture into the literary community and show other countries what our stories can do. Although Hispanic Heritage Month is almost over, it is always a good time to explore other cultures' works and dive into new types of stories. ✿
