By Central Americans
Here, Jessica Hernandez–Maya Ch’orti’ and Zapotec environmental scientist and founder of environmental agency Piña Soul–introduces and contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and proposes a vision of land stewardship that heals rather than displaces, that generates rather than destroys. She breaks down the failures of western-defined conservatism and shares alternatives, citing the restoration work of urban Indigenous people in Seattle; her family’s fight against ecoterrorism in Latin America; and holistic land management approaches of Indigenous groups across the continent.
In Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed, bestselling and award-winning authors as well as up-and-coming voices interrogate the different myths and stereotypes about the Latinx diaspora. These 15 original pieces delve into everything from ghost stories and superheroes, to memories in the kitchen and travels around the world, to addiction and grief, to identity and anti-Blackness, to finding love and speaking your truth.
Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago--"one day, you'll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure."
Javier's adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone except for a group of strangers and a coyote hired to lead them to safety, Javier's trip is supposed to last two short weeks.
At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents' arms, snuggling in bed between them, living under the same roof again. He does not see the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside a group of strangers who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.
A memoir by an acclaimed poet that reads like a novel, Solito not only provides an immediate and intimate account of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier's story, but it's also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.
In this spellbinding debut, Los Angeles–born poet Janel Pineda sings of communal love and the diaspora and dreams for a liberated future. Lineage of Rain traces histories of Salvadoran migration and the US-sponsored civil war to reimagine trauma as a site for transformation and healing. With a scholar’s caliber, Pineda archives family memory, crafting a collection that centers intergenerational narratives through poems filled with a yearning to crystallize a new world—one unmarked by patriarchal violence. At their heart, many of these poems are an homage to women: love letters to mothers, sisters, and daughters.
Lineage of Rain moves from los campos de El Salvador to the firework-laden streets of South Gate to the riverbanks of England. Pineda’s masterful stroke weaves together these seemingly disparate worlds, illustrating the complicated reality of living as a first-generation student.
In her debut collection, The Whisper, The Storm and The Light in Between, Clara vulnerably reveals her experience as a racialized being surviving Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and colonization. She describes her work as a “poetic memoir of diasporic despair and delight,” where she speaks to the trauma, healing, and growth that comes with discovering your most authentic self. Every poem takes you on an emotional ride through the struggle of learning who you are and embracing the love you deserve.
Winner of the 2021 Sara A. Whaley Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)
A first-of-its-kind study of the working-class culture of resistance on the Honduran North Coast and the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention at the onset of the Cold War, examining gender, race, and place.
On May 1, 1954, striking banana workers on the North Coast of Honduras brought the regional economy to a standstill, invigorating the Honduran labor movement and placing a series of demands on the US-controlled banana industry. Their actions ultimately galvanized a broader working-class struggle and reawakened long-suppressed leftist ideals. The first account of its kind in English, Roots of Resistance explores contemporary Honduran labor history through the story of the great banana strike of 1954 and centers the role of women in the narrative of the labor movement.
Drawing on extensive firsthand oral history and archival research, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda examines the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention in Honduras at the onset of the Cold War. She reveals the everyday acts of resistance that laid the groundwork for the 1954 strike and argues that these often-overlooked forms of resistance should inform analyses of present-day labor and community organizing. Roots of Resistance highlights the complexities of transnational company hierarchies, gender and race relations, and labor organizing that led to the banana workers' strike and how these dynamics continue to reverberate in Honduras today.
Born in Nicaragua, Rubén Darío is known as the consummate leader of the Modernista movement, an esthetic trend that swept the Americas from Mexico to Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. Seeking a language and a style that would distinguish the newly emergent nations from the old imperial power of Spain, Darío’s writing offered a refreshingly new vision of the world—an artistic sensibility at once cosmopolitan and connected to the rhythms of nature. The first part of this collection presents Darío’s most significant poems in a bilingual format and organized thematically in the way Darío himself envisioned them. The second part is devoted to Darío’s prose, including short stories, fables, profiles, travel writing, reportage, opinion pieces, and letters. A sweeping biographical introduction by distinguished critic Ilan Stavans places Darío in historical and artistic context, not only in Latin America, but in world literature.
This book recounts the remarkable life of Rigoberta Menchú , a young Guatemalan peasant woman. Her story reflects the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America today. Rigoberta suffered gross injustice and hardship in her early life: her brother, father and mother were murdered by the Guatemalan military. She learned Spanish and turned to catechist work as an expression of political revolt as well as religious commitment.
These three novellas, by a writer who has earned her place in the forefront of Central American literature, explore three critical stages in a woman's life and are an extraordinary example of Claribel Alegria's ability to weave the magical and the real, the fantastic and the horrific. Karen, a young 'corrupted' Catholic school girl, talks to the walls and forms a strange relationship with an especially prudish nun. Ximena, a Nicaraguan woman living in Paris, finds herself being drawn into the 1979 revolution even though she is thousands of miles away. Marcia moves with her husband to Deya, a small mystical town in Mallorca where everyday life is a bizarre mixture of the supernatural and natural worlds.
In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: "Earth." There are no inhabitants, and no sun--only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.
This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, "the book of the woven mat," one of the epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose--and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett.
An electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution.
Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels.
Written by a Garifuna, the story begins in South America, where people who spoke Arawak-an Amerindian language fashioned a culture based on yuca or cassava farming, hunting and fishing in a dense forest cut by many rivers. By the year 1000 AD some of them had moved up the Orinoco River to the Caribbean Sea and its islands, where they established a new way of life. Later other people, whom history has called "Caribs", moved into the Caribbean out of the same areas. The Caribs welcomed and protected the Black refugees, and in time allowed them to marry the Caribs. The Africans then adopted the languages, culture and traditions of the Yellow Island Caribs. The intermarriage brought about a rapid growth of hybrid mixture of African and Indigenous Caribs. From this union arose a half-bred race possessing some Caribs and African characteristics to which the name Garifuna or Black Carib was given.
Elvia Alvarado tells the story of her life and the life of the people of Honduras. Read it and understand the struggle against tyranny of the poor. Read it and act.
This Honduran writer recorded famous fables from The Black Sheep and more.
One of the most important Latin-American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nicaraguan poet and essayist Rubén Darío (the pen name of Félix Rubén García Sarmiento) is considered the high priest of the modernismo school of literature, known for its dazzling verbal virtuosity and technical perfection.
The present volume contains a rich selection of Darío's best poems and stories, carefully chosen from Azul (Blue), Prosas profanas (Worldly Hymns), Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope), El canto errante (The Wandering Song), and Poema del otoño (Poem of autumn). Stanley Appelbaum has provided accurate English translations (line for line in the poetry section) on the pages facing the original Spanish, as well as an informative introduction to Darío's life and work, and annotations to the individual stories and poems. The result is a superb resource for any student of Spanish language and literature or anyone interested in one of the earliest and most influential literary movements of the twentieth century.
An anthology of Central American writers living in the United States that incorporates all genres and styles. It features work that captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latino groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a U.S. publisher, perfect for high school, college, or university courses in U.S. literature, Latino literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies.
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Héctor Tobar's debut novel is a tragic tale of destiny and consequence set in downtown Los Angeles on the eve of the 1992 riots. Antonio Bernal is a Guatemalan refugee haunted by memories of his wife and child murdered at the hands of a man marked with a yellow tattoo. Not far from Antonio's apartment, Guillermo Longoria extends his arm and reveals a tattoo--yellow pelt, black spots, red mouth. It is the mark of the death squad, the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army. A chance encounter ignites a psychological showdown between these two men who discover that the war in Central America has followed them to the quemazones, the "great burning" of the Los Angeles riots.
The first English-language translation of the work of a Guatemalan master, this groundbreaking achievement of "ethnographic surrealism" promotes cross-cultural understanding. A liberating, avant-garde recreation of popular tales and characters from the Guatemalan collective unconscious-including, from the Mayan sacred text, the Popol Vuh-this book contains a riot of folklore, colonial resistance, animistic nature, and the unfolding drama of hybrid ethnic identity formation.
Guatemalan diplomat and writer Miguel Angel Asturias (1899–1974) began this award-winning work while still a law student. It is a story of a ruthless dictator and his schemes to dispose of a political adversary in an unnamed Latin American country usually identified as Guatemala. The book has been acclaimed for portraying both a totalitarian government and its damaging psychological effects. Drawing from his experiences as a journalist writing under repressive conditions, Asturias employs such literary devices as satire to convey the government’s transgressions and surrealistic dream sequences to demonstrate the police state’s impact on the individual psyche. Asturias’s stance against all forms of injustice in Guatemala caused critics to view the author as a compassionate spokesperson for the oppressed. My work,” Asturias promised when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, “will continue to reflect the voice of the people, gathering their myths and popular beliefs and at the same time seeking to give birth to a universal consciousness of Latin American problems.”