A list of literature about Central America including works written by Central American writers. Browsing options available by country.
* An asterisk indicates that it was written/told by a person from Central America
Disclaimer: Many of these books are written by predominantly white non-Central Americans from the Imperial Core. ISP acknowledges and encourage reflection on the power dynamics and the dis/misinformation that is part of knowledge production.
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.
Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, The Fourth Invasion examines an Ixil Maya community’s movement against the construction of one of the largest hydroelectric plants in Guatemala. The arrival of the Palo Viejo hydroelectric plant (built by the Italian corporation Enel Green Power) to the municipality of Cotzal highlighted the ongoing violence inflicted on Ixils by outsiders and the Guatemalan state. Locals referred to the building of the hydroelectric plant as the “new invasion” or “fourth invasion” for its similarity to preceding invasions: Spanish colonization, the creation of the plantation economy, and the state-led genocide during the Guatemalan armed conflict.
Through a historical account of cyclical waves of invasions and resistance in Cotzal during the four invasions, Giovanni Batz argues that extractivist industries are a continuation of a colonial logic of extraction based on the displacement and destruction of Indigenous Peoples' territories and values that has existed since the arrival of the Spanish in 1524. The current movements in Cotzal, rooted in a long history of resistance, counter dominant narratives of Indigenous Peoples that often portray them as “conquered.”
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.
El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo’s regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail. Each believing the other to be dead, they escape, fleeing across the globe, reinventing themselves until fate ultimately brings them back together in the most unlikely of ways…
Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.
An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own.
An ordinary man wakes one morning to discover he’s a famous reggaetón star. An aging abuela slowly morphs into a marionette puppet. A struggling academic discovers the horrifying cost of becoming a Self-Made Man.
In There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Ruben Reyes Jr. conjures strange dreamlike worlds to explore what we would do if we woke up one morning and our lives were unrecognizable. Boundaries between the past, present, and future are blurred. Menacing technology and unchecked bureaucracy cut through everyday life with uncanny dread. The characters, from mango farmers to popstars to ex-guerilla fighters to cyborgs, are forced to make uncomfortable choices—choices that not only mean life or death, but might also allow them to be heard in a world set on silencing the voices of Central Americans.
Born into a large, close-knit family in Nicaragua, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez grew up surrounded by strong, kind, funny, sensitive, resilient, judgmental, messy, beautiful women. Whether blood relatives or chosen family, these tías and primas fundamentally shaped her view of the world—and so did the labels that were used to talk about them. The tía loca who is shunned for defying gender roles. The pretty prima put on a pedestal for her European features. The matriarch who is the core of her community but hides all her pain.
In Tías and Primas, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts, Mojica Rodríguez explores these archetypes. Fearlessly grappling with the effects of intergenerational trauma, centuries of colonization, and sexism, she attempts to heal the pain that is so often embodied in female family lines.
In Florida, one of the first things you're taught as a child is that if you're ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It's a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez's life.
Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez's quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez's unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.
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.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.
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.
In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.
In First in the Family, Hoppe shares her journey, the first in her family to do so, and takes the reader on a remarkable investigation of her family’s history and the erasure of BIPOC from recovery institutions and narratives, leaving the reader with an urgent message of hope.
In this collection of eighty recipes, Karla shares her conversations with moms, aunts, grandmothers, and friends to preserve their histories so that they do not go unheard. Here are recipes for Rellenos de Papa from Patricia, who remembers the Los Angeles earthquakes of the 1980s for more reasons than just fear; Flor de Izote con Huevos Revueltos, a favorite of Karla's father; as well as variations on the beloved Salvadoran Pupusa, a thick masa tortilla stuffed with different combinations of pork, cheese, and beans. Though their stories vary, the women have a shared experience of what it was like in El Salvador before the war, and what life was like as Salvadoran women surviving in their new home in the United States.
A queer YA coming-of-age set during the rigged Honduran presidential election about a young poet discovering the courage it takes to speak her truth about the people and country she loves.
As the contentious 2017 presidential election looms and protests rage across every corner of the city, life in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, churns louder and faster. For her part, high school senior Libertad (Libi) Morazán takes heart in writing political poetry for her anonymous Instagram account and a budding romance with someone new. But things come to a head when Mami sees texts on her phone mentioning a kiss with a girl and Libi discovers her beloved older brother, Maynor, playing a major role in the protests. As Libertad faces the political and social corruption around her, stifling homophobia at home and school, and ramped up threats to her poetry online, she begins dreaming of a future in which she doesn't have to hide who she is or worry about someone she loves losing their life just for speaking up. Then the ultimate tragedy strikes, and leaving her family and friends--plus the only home she's ever known--might be her only option.
The founder of Latina Rebels’ “electrifying debut” ( LA Times ) arms women of color with the tools and knowledge they need to find success on their own terms. For generations, Brown girls have had to push against powerful forces of sexism, racism, and classism, often feeling alone in the struggle. By founding Latina Rebels, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez has created a community to help women fight together. She offers wisdom and a liberating path forward for all women of color. She crafts powerful ways to address the challenges Brown girls face, from imposter syndrome to colorism. She empowers women to decolonize their worldview, and defy “universal” white narratives, by telling their own stories. Her book guides women of color toward a sense of pride and sisterhood and offers essential tools to energize a movement.
May it spark a fire within you.
"Maldonado thrills with the contradictions in New York City life, where the people, in mourning over another victim of police brutality, can take over a plaza named to honor a colonizer; where the laundromat offers communion and the subway a site for Emersonian contemplation; where laying on your couch very well may be the ultimate act of resistance; where you could be a Central American Quaker in a Caribbean borough grooving to an Icelandic dance queen's DJing. Spunk, grit, the real deal, that's what you get here." -Mónica de la Torre
A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.”
With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.
A name for the people of Honduras, Catrachos is a term of solidarity and resilience. In these unflinching, riveting poems, Roy G. Guzmán reaches across borders—between life and death and between countries—invoking the voices of the lost. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, Catrachos finds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the “Queerodactyl,” which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán’s debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity—an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice.
Migrant Psalms gives us a look inside a Panamanian experience of migration, describing the harsh realities of mothers, children, and teens who entered the United States—or tried to do so. Holnes’s poems find the universal through specificity; their exploration of expatriation, assimilation, and naturalization transcends the author’s personal experience to speak to what it means to be “other” anywhere.
The collection begins with “Kyrie,” a coming‑to‑America chronicle that spans three years in Texas, modeled after the liturgical Christian prayer Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy). Other poems experiment with macaronic language and form to parallel shifts in the speaker’s status from immigrant to citizen, ending with “The 21st Century Poem,” which probes what’s “real” in today’s New York City. Through the speaker’s quest to become an American, this collection asks: Who are we becoming as individuals, as a society, as a nation, as a world? And is faith enough to enact change? Or is it just the first step?
Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, and her husband disappears, the future of Teresa’s family is changed forever.
Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family’s rupture.
Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There Was Fire.
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.”
The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States by Héctor Tobar and Juan Jos Dalton*
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.
Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America by Robert Brenneman
Why would a gun-wielding, tattoo-bearing "homie" trade in la vida loca for a Bible and the buttoned-down lifestyle of an evangelical hermano (brother in Christ)? To answer this question, Robert Brenneman interviewed sixty-three former gang members from the "Northern Triangle" of Central America--Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras--most of whom left their gang for evangelicalism. Unlike in the United States, membership in a Central American gang is hasta la morgue. But the most common exception to the "morgue rule" is that of conversion or regular participation in an evangelical church. Do gang members who weary of their dangerous lifestyle simply make a rational choice to opt for evangelical religion? Brenneman finds this is only partly the case, for many others report emotional conversions that came unexpectedly, when they found themselves overwhelmed by a sermon, a conversation, or a prayer service. An extensively researched and gritty account, Homies and Hermanos sheds light on the nature of youth violence, of religious conversion, and of evangelical churches in Central America.
A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America by Óscar Martínez
Óscar Martínez, author of The Beast, named one of the best books of the year by the Economist, Mother Jones, and the Financial Times, fleshes out these stark figures with true stories, producing a jarringly beautiful and immersive account of life in deadly locations.
Martínez travels to Nicaraguan fishing towns, southern Mexican brothels where Central American women are trafficked, isolated Guatemalan villages, and crime-ridden Salvadoran neighborhoods.
Volcán: Poems from Central America by Alejandro Murguía
A contact bomb, a volcano ready to erupt" describes not only Central America in the 1980s but—in the conception of its editors—this anthology of contraband poetry. The poems themselves were often copied by hand and smuggled onto Mexico, from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In all those countries, except Nicaragua, this poetry is banned. The thirty-nine poets represented here give potent voice to the struggles of their peoples under the crushing oppression of life "under the volcano" in these war-stunned lands. Many of these women and men have been jailed, exiled, killed, or otherwise made to disappear. Still they survive in these faithful and sensitive translations by a new literary underground in North America.
Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America & The Struggle for Peace by Noam Chomsky
Shows how U.S. Central American policies implement broader US economic, military, and social aims even while describing their impact on the lives of people in Central America.
Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America by Steven Mayers and Jonathan Freedman
They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. Solito, Solita, (“Alone, Alone”), is a Voice of Witness collection of oral histories that tell the stories of youth refugees fleeing their home countries and traveling for hundreds of miles seeking safety and protection in the United States.
These powerful narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the border, and their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. In an era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the compelling voices of immigrant youth. What can they teach us about abuse and abandonment, bravery and resilience, hypocrisy and hope? They bring us into their hearts and onto streets filled with the lure of freedom and fraught with violence. From fending off kidnappers with knives and being locked in freezing holding cells to tearful reunions with parents, Solito, Solita’s evocative stories bring to light the experiences of young people struggling for a better life across the border.
Steven Mayers is a writer, oral historian, and professor of English at the City College of San Francisco.
Jonathan Freedman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, author, and writing mentor at the City College of San Francisco. Voice of Witness, founded by Dave Eggers, Mimi Lok, and Lola Vollen, is a nonprofit organization that advances human rights by amplifying unheard voices.
The Other Side: Stories of Central American Teen Refugees Who Dream of Crossing the Border by Juan Pablo Villalobos
Award-winning Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos explores illegal immigration with this emotionally raw and timely nonfiction book about ten Central American teens and their journeys to the United States.
You can't really tell what time it is when you're in the freezer.
Every year, thousands of migrant children and teens cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The journey is treacherous and sometimes deadly, but worth the risk for migrants who are escaping gang violence and poverty in their home countries. And for those refugees who do succeed? They face an immigration process that is as winding and multi-tiered as the journey that brought them here.
In this book, award-winning Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos strings together the diverse experiences of eleven real migrant teenagers, offering readers a beginning road map to issues facing the region. These timely accounts of courage, sacrifice, and survival—including two fourteen-year-old girls forming a tenuous friendship as they wait in a frigid holding cell, a boy in Chicago beginning to craft his future while piecing together his past in El Salvador, and cousins learning to lift each other up through angry waters—offer a rare and invaluable window into the U.S.–Central American refugee crisis.
In turns optimistic and heartbreaking, The Other Side balances the boundless hope at the center of immigration with the weight of its risks and repercussions. Here is a necessary read for young people on both sides of the issue.
Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America by Walter F. LaFeber
This book explains the history of US/Central American relations, explaining why these countries have remained so overpopulated, illiterate and violent; and why US government notions of economic and military security combine to keep in place a system of Central American dependency. This second edition is updated to include new material covering the Reagan and Bush years, and the Iran/Contra affair.
