LibGuides: Learning Resource Center (LRC): National Hispanic Heritage Month

National Hispanic Heritage Month Resources

The American Latino
The American Latino: Psychodynamic Perspectives on Culture and Mental Health Issues focuses on the culture of the Hispanic population in the United States and replaces stereotypes with portrayals based on factual information. The scope of the material covered is vast and includes the topics of ethnic identity, gender roles, religion and spirituality, family resilience, and the joys and sufferings of leading a bicultural life.
Curanderismo by Robert T. Trotter; Juan Antonio Chavira; Luis D. Leon (Foreword by)
The practice of curanderismo, or Mexican American folk medicine, is part of a historically and culturally important health care system deeply rooted in native Mexican healing techniques. This is the first book to describe the practice from an insider's point of view, based on the authors' three-year apprenticeships with curanderos (healers). Robert T. Trotter and Juan Antonio Chavira present an intimate view of not only how curanderismo is practiced but also how it is learned and passed on as a healing tradition.
Food, Health, and Culture in Latino Los Angeles by Sarah Portnoy
Contemporary Los Angeles can increasingly be considered a part of Latin America. Only 200 miles from the border with Mexico, it has the largest, most diverse population of Latinos in the United States--and reportedly the second largest population of Mexicans outside of Mexico City. Despite the expansion of Latino cuisine's popularity in Los Angeles and the celebrity of many Latino chefs, there is a stark divide between what is available at restaurants and food trucks and what is available to many low-income, urban Latinos who live in food deserts. In these areas, access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate foods is a daily challenge. Food-related diseases, particularly diabetes and obesity, plague these communities. In the face of this crisis, grassroots organizations, policy-makers and local residents are working to improve access and affordability through a growing embrace of traditional cuisine, an emergent interest in the farm-to-table movement, and the work of local organizations.
Immigration, Acculturation, and Health by Jill S. Reichman
Reichman debunks the myth of the cognitive and behavioral intransigence of first generation Mexican immigrants. Focusing on health care, she reveals the flexibility of female immigrants beliefs about health and illness. She demonstrates how the rate of acculturation varies with the complaint: those with chronic disease shift health ideology faster than those sick from sub-acute illnesses. Ultimately, all sojourners learn new ways to care for themselves and redefine how they prevent and treat disease.

Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History by F. Arturo Rosales
"From the Alianza Hispano-Americana, a mutual aid society founded in Tucson, Arizona in 1894, to the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943, this first-ever dictionary of important issues in the U.S. Latino struggle for civil rights defines a wide-ranging list of key terms. With over 922 entries on significant events, figures, laws, and other historical items, this ground-breaking reference work covers the fight for equality from the mid-nineteenth century to the present by the various Hispanic groups in the United States."
From Out of the Shadows by Vicki L. Ruiz
From Out of the Shadows was the first full study of Mexican-American women in the twentieth century. Beginning with the first wave of Mexican women crossing the border early in the century, historian Vicki L. Ruiz reveals the struggles they have faced and the communities they have built. In a narrative enhanced by interviews and personal stories, she shows how from labor camps, boxcar settlements, and urban barrios, Mexican women nurtured families, worked for wages, built extended networks, and participated in community associations--efforts that helped Mexican Americans find their own place in America.
Latin American Migrations to the U. S. Heartland
This collection examines Latina/o immigrants and the movement of the Latin American labor force to the central states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. Contributors look at outside factors affecting migration, including corporate agriculture, technology, globalization, and government. They also reveal how cultural affinities like religion, strong family ties, farming, and cowboy culture attract these newcomers to the Heartland. Throughout, essayists point to how hostile neoliberal policy reforms have made it difficult for Latin American immigrants to find social and economic stability.
Latino Politics en Ciencia Política by Tony Affigne; Evelyn Hu-DeHart; Marion Orr
More than 53 million Latinos now constitute the largest, fastest-growing, and most diverse minority group in the United States, and the nation's political future may well be shaped by Latinos' continuing political incorporation. In the 2012 election, Latinos proved to be a critical voting bloc in both Presidential and Congressional races; this demographic will only become more important in future American elections. Using new evidence from the largest-ever scientific survey addressed exclusively to Latino/Hispanic respondents, Latino Politics en Ciencia Política explores political diversity within the Latino community, considering how intra-community differences influence political behavior and policy preferences.
A Nation for All by Alejandro de la Fuente
After thirty years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well represented, had envisioned an egalitarian and inclusive country--a nation for all, as Jose Marti described it. But did the Cuban republic, and later the Cuban revolution, live up to these expectations?
Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America by Marina Llorente, Marcella Salvi, and Aída Díaz de León
ISBN: 9781498507783
Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America is a collection of essays that explores historical memory at the intersection of political, cultural, social, and economic forces in the contexts of Spain and Latin America. The essays here focus on a variety of forms of memory-from the most concrete to the performative-that resist forgetting and unite individuals against hegemonic memory. The volume comprises four thematic sections that focus on Chile, Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.

Cinema and Inter-American Relations by Adrián Pérez Melgosa; Adrián Pérez Melgosa
Cinema and Inter-American Relations studies the key role that commercial narrative films have played in the articulation of the political and cultural relationship between the United States and Latin America since the onset of the Good Neighbor policy (1933). Pérez Melgosa analyzes the evolution of inter-American narratives in films from across the continent, highlights the social effects of the technologies used to produce these works, and explores the connections of cinema to successive shifts in hemispheric policy. As a result, Cinema and Inter-American Relations reveals the existence of a continued cinematic conversation between Anglo and Latin America about a cluster of shared allegories representing the continent and its cultures.
Day of the Dead in the USA by Regina M. Marchi
Honoring relatives by tending graves, building altars, and cooking festive meals has been an honored tradition among Latin Americans for centuries. The tribute, "el Dia de los Muertos," has enjoyed renewed popularity since the 1970s when Latino activists and artists in the United States began expanding "Day of the Dead" north of the border with celebrations of performance art, Aztec danza, art exhibits, and other public expressions. Focusing on the power of ritual to serve as a communication medium, Regina M. Marchi combines a mix of ethnography, historical research, oral history, and critical cultural analysis to explore the manifold and unexpected transformations that occur when the tradition is embraced by the mainstream.
The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts by Chon A. Noriega; Ana M. Lopez (Editor)
his groundbreaking volume is the first to examine the range of Latino media arts, from independent feature production to documentary to experimental video. The essays explore the work of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Latino film and video artists and address avant-garde practices, queer media, and performance art as well as more conventional film and video representations. Contributors to The Ethnic Eye provide close readings of a wide variety of films and videos.
Latino Images in Film by Charles Ramírez Berg
The bandido, the harlot, the male buffoon, the female clown, the Latin lover, and the dark lady--these have been the defining, and demeaning, images of Latinos in U.S. cinema for more than a century. In this book, Charles Ramírez Berg develops an innovative theory of stereotyping that accounts for the persistence of such images in U.S. popular culture. He also explores how Latino actors and filmmakers have actively subverted and resisted such stereotyping.
Latinx Literature Unbound by Ralph E. Rodriguez
Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. Extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question "What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?" From this question others emerge: What does Latinx allow or predispose us to see, and what does it preclude us from seeing? If the grouping--which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people under a seemingly homogeneous label--tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature?
Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America by Jerónimo Arellano; Jerónimo Arellano
Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America rethinks the rise and fall of magical realism in Latin America in the light of the cultural history of the emotions, and in conversation with contemporary theories of the affects. It explores how twentieth-century magical realist narrative reimagines public and collective forms of feeling, in particular the colonial history of wonder in the wake of the voyages to the New World. Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America argues that this reconceptualization of magical realism also invites a new reading of its marked devaluation in contemporary Latin American literature, suggesting that this turning point responds to major changes in the uses and circulation of forms of emotional intensity in the present.

Chicana Feminist Thought by Alma M. Garcia (Editor)
Chicana Feminist Thought brings together the voices of Chicana poets, writers, and activists who reflect upon the Chicana Feminist Movement that began in the late 1960s. With energy and passion, this anthology of writings documents the personal and collective political struggles of Chicana feminists.
Labor Rights Are Civil Rights by Zaragosa Vargas
In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era.
Massacre of the Dreamers by Ana Castillo; Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Foreword by)
Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights This new edition of an immensely influential book gives voice to Mexic Amerindian women silenced for hundreds of years by the dual censorship of being female and indigenous. Castillo replaced the term "Chicana feminism" with "Xicanisma" to include mestiza women on both sides of the border. In history, myth, interviews, and ethnography Castillo revisits her reflections on Chicana activism, spiritual practices, sexual attitudes, artistic ideology, labor struggles, and education-related battles. Her book remains a compelling document, enhanced here with a new afterword that reexamines the significance of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Mi Raza Primero, My People First by Ernesto Chávez; Ernesto Chávez
¡Mi Raza Primero! is the first book to examine the Chicano movement's development in one locale--in this case Los Angeles, home of the largest population of people of Mexican descent outside of Mexico City. Ernesto Chávez focuses on four organizations that constituted the heart of the movement: The Brown Berets, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, La Raza Unida Party, and the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, commonly known as CASA. Chávez examines and chronicles the ideas and tactics of the insurgency's leaders and their followers who, while differing in their goals and tactics, nonetheless came together as Chicanos and reformers.
Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can) by Peter Matthiessen; Marc Grossman (Foreword by)
In the summer of 1968 Peter Matthiessen met Cesar Chavez for the first time. They were the same age: forty-one. Matthiessen lived in New York City, while Chavez lived in the Central Valley farm town of Delano, where the grape strike was unfolding. This book is Matthiessen’s panoramic yet finely detailed account of the three years he spent working and traveling with Chavez, including to Sal Si Puedes, the San Jose barrio where Chavez began his organizing. Matthiessen provides a candid look into the many sides of this enigmatic and charismatic leader who lived by the laws of nonviolence. Sal Si Puedes is less reportage than living history.
Testimonio by F. Arturo Rosales
Beginning with the early 1800s and extending to the modern era, Rosales collects illuminating documents that shed light on the Mexican-American quest for life, liberty, and justice. Documents include petitions, correspondence, government reports, political proclamations, newspaper items, congressional testimony, memoirs, and even international treaties.

National Hispanic Heritage Month
September 15 to October 15 is National Hispanic American Heritage Month.
The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society.