Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from September 15th to October 15th. Here are recommended titles for all ages to learn and celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month!
Preschool
Alma and how she got her name / Alma y cómo obtuvo su nombre
When Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela asks her father why she has so many names, she hears the story of her name and learns about her grandparents.
Alma quiere saber por qué su nombre es tan largo, así que Papi le cuenta a su pequeña la gran historia.
Across the Bay / Al otro lado de la bahía
Carlitos lives in a happy home with his mother, his abuela, and Coco the cat. Life in his hometown is cozy as can be, but the call of the capital city pulls Carlitos across the bay in search of his father.
Carlitos vive en un hogar feliz con su madre, su abuela y Coco, el gato. La vida en su pueblo es muy acogedora, pero Carlitos decide ir a la capital, al atro lado de la bahía, en busca de su padre.
Grade School
While his father works two jobs, seventh-grader Efrén Nava must take care of his twin siblings, kindergartners Max and Mia, after their mother is deported to Mexico.
Había una vez… A girl named Petra Peña, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita. But Petra’s world is ending. Earth has been destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children — among them Petra and her family — have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race. Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet — and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth. A sinister Collective has taken over the ship during its journey, bent on erasing the sins of humanity’s past. They have systematically purged the memories of all aboard — or purged them altogether. Petra alone now carries the stories of our past, and with them, any hope for our future. Can she make them live again?
Teen
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents’ house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga’s role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed. But it’s not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first kiss, first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister’s story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal?
Pedro & Daniel is a sweeping and deeply personal novel … that spans from childhood to teenage years to adulthood, all the while tracing the lives of two brothers who are there for each other when no one else is. Together the brothers manage an abusive home life, school, coming out, first loves, first jobs, and the AIDS pandemic, in a coming-of-age story unlike any other.
Adult
The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende
“Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler was six years old when his father disappeared during Kristallnacht–the night their family lost everything. Samuel’s mother secured a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to the United Kingdom, which he boarded alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin. Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz, a blind seven-year-old girl, and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. However, their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination she created with her sister back home. Anita’s case is assigned to Selena Duran, a young social worker who enlists the help of a promising lawyer from one of San Francisco’s top law firms. Together they discover that Anita has another family member in the United States: Leticia Cordero, who is employed at the home of now eighty-six-year-old Samuel Adler, linking these two lives.”
In glamorous 1920s New York City, two characters of sophisticated taste come together. One is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; the other, the brilliant daughter of penniless aristocrats. Steeped in affluence and grandeur, their marriage excites gossip and allows a continued ascent–all at a moment when the country is undergoing a great transformation. This is the story at the center of Harold Vanner’s novel Bonds, which everyone in 1938 New York seems to have read. But it isn’t the only version. Provocative, propulsive, and repeatedly surprising, Hernan Diaz’s Trust puts the story of these characters into conversation with “the truth”–and in tension with the life and perspective of an outsider immersed in the mystery of a competing account. The result is an overarching novel that becomes more exhilarating and profound with each new layer and revelation.”
Vanishing Maps by Cristina García
“From the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban, a new novel that follows three generations of a divided family against the tumultuous backdrops of Cuba, America, Germany, and Russia in the new millennium.”
Crying in the Bathroom by Erika Sánchez – Nonfiction
“Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the ’90s, Erika L. Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment–a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy and dreamed of an unlikely life as a poet. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her. In these essays about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression to the redemptive pursuits of spirituality, art, and travel, Sánchez reveals an interior life that is rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception–that of a woman who charted a path entirely of her own making.”