Hispanic Heritage Month Reading List
Happy everyone! I’m Eric, co-founder and co-chair of Owlmigos! We are Owlchemy’s first employee resource group, and we are dedicated to the cultivation of Latine and Hispanic culture across the games industry. In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, we teamed up with the rest of Owlchemy to curate a list of some of our favorite books written by Latine and Hispanic authors.
We encourage you to check any titles against the Book Trigger Warnings website before picking them up if there are certain topics that may affect you.
Women Who Run with the Wolves
by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“Within every woman, there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society's attempt to "civilize" us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.
In "Women Who Run With the Wolves," Dr Estes unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairytales and stories, many from her own family, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. Dr Estes has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.”
- blurb from Goodreads
Nonfiction, Feminism, Psychology
Buried Onions
by Gary Soto
“On the mean streets of southeast Fresno, nineteen-year-old Eddie is just trying to get by. All he wants is to forget his violent past, hold down a job, and walk a straight line. But after his cousins murder, Eddie finds himself slowly but inexorably drawn back into the cycle of violence… Set against the backdrop of a city sweltering in the grip of poverty, crime, and unfulfilled dreams, this is the unforgettable story of a young man struggling to survive in a world spiraling out of control. Unrelenting ... unsparing ... A valuable tale, its one that makes no concessions.”
- blurb from Goodreads
Fiction, Young Adult, Coming of Age
When I Was Puerto Rican
by Esmeralda Santiago
“Esmeralda Santiago's story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.”
- blurb from Goodreads
Memoir, Nonfiction, Autobiography
Here Are the Tears I You We Didn't Cry
by Vianney Harelly
“Here Are the Tears I You We Didn't Cry is a series of love letters in the form of poetry written in Spanglish from the point of view of the oldest daughter in a Mexican family. The poems include letters to family, culture, identity, past, present and future generations as a way to inspire and support inner child and generational trauma healing within Latine families and communities. The book is half Spanglish, the original fronteriza language, and half translated to Spanish by the author herself.”
- blurb from Goodreads
Anthology, Poetry
