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Celebrando Cultura Book Display 2020

September 15, 2020 - 12:00am to October 15, 2020 - 12:00am
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Matadors! Share your books, music, films and more. Tell us how you celebrate Latinx Heritage Month!

Read about the rich history of the Latinx community with our Celebrando Cultura Book Display which will run until October 15th. The following titles are available digitally through the University Library or LAPL collections.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero.

Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ—the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss.

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Looking Out, Looking in: Anthology of Latino Poetry - Edited by William Luis
Looking Out, Looking in: Anthology of Latino Poetry

More than 60 Latino poets are represented in this wide-ranging collection that focuses on poetry from the four largest groups in the United States: Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans and Dominican Americans. In his introduction, scholar William Luis gives an overview of the origins of Latino literature in the United States, providing historical, political and cultural frameworks for these groups and their writings.

Included are distinguished poets such as Julia Álvarez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Martín Espada and Pedro Pietri, as well as less well-known writers who deserve more recognition. Whether writing about timeless issues or themes specific to their community, the poets in this volume craft a multilayered look at what it means to be Latino in the United States. Looking Out, Looking In is an indispensable and welcome addition to American and Latino literatures.

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Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Bless Me, Ultima

Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima enters his life. She is a curandera, one who heals with herbs and magic. 'We cannot let her live her last days in loneliness,' says Antonio's mother. 'It is not the way of our people,' agrees his father. And so Ultima comes to live with Antonio's family in New Mexico. Soon Tony will journey to the threshold of manhood. Always, Ultima watches over him. She graces him with the courage to face childhood bigotry, diabolical possession, the moral collapse of his brother, and too many violent deaths. Under her wise guidance, Tony will probe the family ties that bind him, and he will find in himself the magical secrets of the pagan past—a mythic legacy equally as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America in which he has been schooled. At each turn in his life there is Ultima who will nurture the birth of his soul.

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Almost a Woman: A Memoir by Esmerelda Santiago
Almost a Woman: A Memoir

"Negi," as Santiago's family affectionately calls her, leaves rural Macún in 1961 to live in a three-room tenement apartment with seven young siblings, an inquisitive grandmother, and a strict mother who won't allow her to date. At thirteen, Negi yearns for her own bed, privacy, and a life with her father, who remains in Puerto Rico. Translating for Mami at the welfare office in the morning, starring as Cleopatra at New York's prestigious Performing Arts High School in the afternoons, and dancing salsa all night, she yearns to find balance between being American and being Puerto Rican. When Negi defies her mother by going on a series of hilarious dates, she finds that independence brings its own set of challenges.

At once a universally poignant coming-of-age tale and a brave and heartfelt immigrant's story, Almost a Woman is Santiago's triumphant journey into womanhood.

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En el Nombre de Salomé by Julia Alvarez
En el nombre de Salomé

In recent years, novelists Mona Simpson (Anywhere But Here), Karla Kuban (Marchlands) and Susannah Moore (My Old Sweetheart), among numerous others, have memorably explored the mother-daughter relationship, showing us the conflicted, often painful intersections of the lives of their multigenerational characters. But in Julia Alvarez's new novel, In the Name of Salome, the mother, Dominican poet and political muse Salomé Ureña, only lives long enough to hear her three-year-old daughter Camila recite one of her consumptive mother's poems. What we get, then, is a compelling work of fiction based on remarkably tireless research and shaped by Camila's reach into the past, into her mother's history and her mother's place in history, in order to make sense of the choices she has made about her own.

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Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits by Celia Correas de Zapata
Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits

Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits is a passionate look at the life and literary work of one of the most renowned contemporary writers in Latin American literature. Celia Correas Zapata traces Isabel Allende's trajectory in Allende's own voice, through a series of interviews that reveal her experiences, her family environment, and the genesis and creation of her triumphs.Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits allows the reader to explore the intimate life of the Chilean author, a woman who produces novels that shake the emotional fibers of millions of readers throughout the world. Finally, in this book, her readers will have a true portrait of Isabel Allende: the writer and the woman.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful abriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendiá family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women—brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul—this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.

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My Big Sister/Mi Hermana Mayor by Samuel Caraballo, Thelma Muraida (Illustrator)
My Big Sister/Mi Hermana Mayor

In this tender, bilingual tribute to his big sister, Pablito recounts all the things she does for him while their parents are at work, sewing "jeans for the whole world."

Anita wakes him up and makes his breakfast, "Yummy! Yum! / Hot, creamy oatmeal / topped with blueberries and raisins." She holds his hand while walking him to the bus stop, and when the bus arrives, "I wrap my arms around her. / She tattoos a red kiss on my cheek." Anita is there to greet him when the yellow school bus drops him off in the afternoon, and she helps him with his homework, "just like Mom and Dad."

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Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez
Bodega Dreams

The word is out in Spanish Harlem: Willy Bodega is king. Need college tuition for your daughter? Start-up funds for your fruit stand? Bodega can help. He gives everyone a leg up, in exchange only for loyalty--and a steady income from the drugs he pushes.

Lyric, inspired, and darkly funny, this powerful debut novel brilliantly evokes the trial of Chino, a smart, promising young man to whom Bodega turns for a favor. Chino is drawn to Bodega's street-smart idealism, but soon finds himself over his head, navigating an underworld of switchblade tempers, turncoat morality, and murder.

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Los Recuerdos de Ana Calderón by Graciela Limón
Los Recuerdos de Ana Calderón

Ana's idyllic childhood, romping among the dunes in a Mexican fishing village, is shattered when her mother dies in childbirth, and Ana must assume the duties of caring for the younger ones of the family. Not only must she assume adult responsibility, but she must challenge her community's consensus about the role she has inherited as a female. In order to earn enough for his family to survive, Ana's father takes the children and an adopted son to the United States. Here begins Ana's long torturous odyssey towards self-fulfillment. On the way, she must face her father's ever-increasing wrath, her sisters' envy and society's rigidity as she becomes more independent. But what is in store for her is more pain than her father alone can inflict: a treacherous love affair that leaves her with child, banishment from the sisters she has raised, a prison term, grueling agricultural work. Ana overcomes all but fate itself in this novel of surprising plot twists and unforgiving destiny.

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Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Like Water for Chocolate

The number one bestseller in Mexico and America for almost two years, and subsequently a bestseller around the world, Like Water For Chocolate is a romantic, poignant tale, touched with moments of magic, graphic earthiness, bittersweet wit - and recipes.

A sumptuous feast of a novel, it relates the bizarre history of the all-female De La Garza family. Tita, the youngest daughter of the house, has been forbidden to marry, condemned by Mexican tradition to look after her mother until she dies. But Tita falls in love with Pedro, and he is seduced by the magical food she cooks. In desperation, Pedro marries her sister Rosaura so that he can stay close to her, so that Tita and Pedro are forced to circle each other in unconsummated passion. Only a freakish chain of tragedies, bad luck and fate finally reunite them against all the odds.

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The Mexican Flyboy by Alfredo Véa
The Mexican Flyboy

Abandoned as a child, brooding and haunted as an adult, Simon Vegas, "the Mexican Flyboy," toils for years to repair a time machine that fell into his hands in Vietnam. With the help of his friend, eccentric Hephaestus Segundo, Simon uses the device to fly through time. Wherever acts of human cruelty take place, in the past or in the present, the machine lets him lift the suffering away and deliver them to a utopian afterlife. Blending magical realism, science fiction, history, and comic-book fantasy, The Mexican Flyboy swoops readers from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the vineyards of Northern California, from Ethel Rosenberg’s execution to Joan of Arc's pyre, in a tale of justice, trauma, regret, and redemption.

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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

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 premier novelists of our time.

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The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits, the unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.

One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate.

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