Collection: Shop Latinx

Itzel's 13th birthday party starts in just about the unluckiest way possible--with her dad having a heart attack. In those frantic moments, the piñata and the frosted sheetcake and the Styrofoam cups of orange soda are forgotten; the day's highlights end up being CPR, an ambulance ride, and angioplasty. But when her father gets home from the hospital, his problems are far from over--and Itzel's are just getting started.

Nothing's Ever the Same chronicles a young girl's coming of age in Chicago--growing up as her family grows apart. In masterful fashion, Cyn Vargas gives us a touching and memorable and universal story about a marriage on the brink and a teenager looking for love. It's a short book that packs a wallop; it's also a beautiful meditation on dysfunction and forgiveness, and all the times in life to which we can never return.

The New Chicago Classics are a disparate set of titles united around a common theme: showcasing the city's up-and-coming literary talents as they produce enduring works. These excellent titles are destined to stand in the first rank of literature about the second city.

To be free, we must learn to fly.

Tere Sanchez has always known who she was: a professor, a wife, a mother, and a friend. But when her husband dies unexpectedly, she finds herself completely broken. Taking a leave from the university, Tere hopes that she can mourn her husband and get back on her feet, but instead, she spends a year consumed by grief.

Until the day she levitates.

Suddenly, Tere's life is thrown into disarray, and the repeated incidents of levitation not only make her question her sanity, but also put her in danger. She decides she will do anything to stop them. So when she's reminded that her family is related to the renowned levitating mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, she leaves the refuge of her home and travels to Spain, hoping to find answers. But Saints can be elusive, and not all answers are easily found. Tere will soon have to decide whether to remain shrouded in her grief, or open her heart to a world where we need no wings to fly...

From the award-winning author of The Storyteller's Death comes a riveting, multicultural story about what it means to love, heal, and take flight.

In this funny and inspiring novel from the authors of The Better Half, a mess of a heroine is desperate to resolve her past so she can finally rediscover who she was always meant to be.

Antonia "Toni" Arroyo's protective mother has outdated notions for her daughter's life: employ her natural beauty and marry young. But Toni has wholly different aspirations.

A promising inventor and budding entrepreneur, she fights to keep her passions alive as a financially strapped mother of twins with a job in airport transportation services that has her going in circles. One treasured frequent passenger is elderly traveler Sylvia Eisenberg, Toni's sage but unofficial adviser and cheerleader. When Toni meets Sylvia's grandson, Ash, a striking venture capitalist, luck just might bend her way.

With a game-changing new business endeavor in development, Toni hustles an opportunity to pitch her idea on TV's Innovation Nation. Toni's unexpected challenger? Her very own recently resurfaced, self-aggrandizing not-quite-ex-husband. As Toni's interrupted past collides with her tenuous future, she is more determined than ever to follow through on her delayed dreams. Toni's been clinging to "maybe" for so long--it's finally time for "absolutely."

The dramatic life of Vietnam War hero Roy Benavidez, a Mexican American Green Beret from a working-class family with deep roots in Texas, revealing how Hispanic Americans have long shaped US history

In May 1968, while serving in Vietnam, Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez led the rescue of a reconnaissance team surrounded by hundreds of enemy soldiers. He saved the lives of at least eight of his comrades that day in a remarkable act of valor that left him permanently disabled. Awarded the Medal of Honor after a yearslong campaign, Benavidez became a highly sought-after public speaker, a living symbol of military heroism, and one of the country's most prominent Latinos.  

Now, historian William Sturkey tells Benavidez's life story in full for the first time. Growing up in Jim Crow-era Texas, Benavidez was scorned as "Mexican" despite his family's deep roots in the state. He escaped poverty by enlisting in a desegregating military and was first deployed amid the global upheavals of the 1950s. Even after receiving the Medal of Honor, Benavidez was forced to fight for disability benefits amid Reagan-era cutbacks.

An unwavering patriot alternately celebrated and snubbed by the country he loved, Benavidez embodied many of the contradictions inherent in twentieth-century Latino life. The Ballad of Roy Benavidez places that experience firmly at the heart of the American story. 

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes's family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader--serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.

From "Recall"

Oh, pipe me back to my familiar earth,

for it is slipping slowly from me.

An unflinching and intimate memoir of recovery by Jessica Hoppe, Latinx writer, advocate, and creator of @NuevaYorka.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024: Today.com, LupitaReads, Electric Literature

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For readers of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon.

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, the American dream, and the erasure of POC from recovery institutions and narratives, leaving the reader with an urgent message of hope.

A new paperback edition of Julia Alvarez's beloved Pura Belpre winner about life in Trujillo's Dominican Republic. "Diary entries written by a child while in hiding will remind readers of Anne Frank's story." --SLJ

Anita de la Torre never questioned her freedom living in the Dominican Republic. But by her twelfth birthday in 1960, most of her relatives have immigrated to the United States, her Tio Toni has disappeared without a trace, and the government's secret police terrorize her remaining family because of their suspected opposition to Trujillo's iron-fisted rule.

Using the strength and courage of her family, Anita must overcome her fears and fly to freedom, leaving all that she once knew behind.

From renowned author Julia Alvarez comes an unforgettable story about adolescence, perseverance, and one girl's struggle to be free.

A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year
Winner of the Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature
Winner of the Pura Belpre Award
An ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults
An ALA-ALSC Notable Children's Book

"A stirring work of art." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"A realistic and compelling account of a girl growing up too quickly while coming to terms with the cost of freedom." --The Horn Book, Starred Review

"Diary entries written by the child while in hiding will remind readers of Anne Frank's story. . . . Readers will bite their nails as the story moves to its inexorable conclusion." --SLJ

"Alvarez's story will spark intense discussion about politics and family." --Booklist

With the English and Spanish text side by side on the page, this bilingual edition of the rockin' picture book about a tenacious girl who achieves her wildest dreams with a little help from her community and a broken guitar is ideal for bilingual readers as well as Spanish speakers learning English and vice versa.

From the creators of Paletero Man/ Que Paletero tan Cool!--Latin Grammy-winning musician Lucky Diaz and celebrated artist Micah Player!

Strum! Strum! Strum! Get ready to rock with la guitarrista!

When Canta finds a guitar in the trash, she is one step closer to becoming a rock star. Even though the guitar is broken and she doesn't know how to play, nothing can stop Canta from going after her dreams!

Perfect for fans of Because and We Will Rock Our Classmates, La Guitarrista, The Rock Star will have readers rocking out to this empowering tale of resilience, community, the power of music--and never giving up on your dreams.

Includes an author's note from Lucky Diaz and a link to the Lucky Band's song inspired by the book.

Join a family for a fiesta in their one-room casita in this exuberant Latino retelling of the beloved folktale Always Room for One More, which celebrates the importance of kindness and community, and includes Spanish words throughout the text.

Don Manuel and Doña Lila love welcoming others into their home--no one is ever turned away. One day, their casita overflows with friends and loved ones and the house begins to shake and crack, causing chaos before everyone rushes out. To the family's dismay, their beloved home collapses. But where there is goodwill, there is also a way. In no time at all, their friends get to work and rebuild the casita, proving just how important teamwork is when fixing a problem.

This vibrant Latino retelling of a popular Scottish ballad celebrates kindness, community, and the selfless gesture of giving back.

Cholo Writing is the 20th century's oldest form of graffiti, a Mexican-American phenomenon evident in Los Angeles long before the appearance of tags and pieces in the late 1960s New York. It has had a major influence on the visual expressions of Californian popular culture, including the lowrider, surf, skate and hip-hop movements.

Placas are territorial inscriptions created to define a gang's turf, a genuine, constantly evolving urban calligraphy with strict codes used by Latino gangs for street writing since the late 1930s. Here, the aesthetic evolution of Cholo Writing is documented and the influence of blackletter typefaces and calligraphic models such as Old English is traced through two collections of photographs. One by Californian Howard Gribble, who photographed Chicano gang graffiti over a wide geographic area in the early 1970s, and one by French graphic designer and writer Francois Chastanet, who traveled to the same Los Angeles neighborhoods in 2008 to document early 21st century inscriptions. After being out of print and in high demand for years, Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles is finally available in a beautiful hardcover edition. The main essay of this second edition has been updated according to the latest historical research on lettering sources.

After being out of print and in high demand for years, Cholo Writing is finally available in a beautiful hardcover edition.

With foreword by OG Chaz Bojorquez, East Los Angeles graffiti pioneer and Godfather of West Coast Cholo Writing for over 50 years.

Puerto Rico has been an "unincorporated territory" of the United States for over a century. For much of that time, the archipelago has been mostly invisible to US residents and neglected by the government. Recently, a series of crises, from outsized debt to climate fueled disasters, have led to massive protests and brought Puerto Rico greater visibility.

Monica A. Jimenez argues that to fully understand how and why Puerto Rico finds itself in this current moment of precarity, we must look to a larger history of US settler colonialism and racial exclusion in law. The federal policies and jurisprudence that created Puerto Rico exist within a larger pantheon of exclusionary, race-based laws and policies that have carved out "states of exception" for racial undesirables: Native Americans, African Americans, and the inhabitants of the insular territories. This legal regime has allowed the federal government plenary or complete power over these groups. Jimenez brings these histories together to demonstrate that despite Puerto Rico's unique position as a twenty-first-century colony, its path to that place was not exceptional.

Un vívido relato de ficción histórica sobre el activismo comunitario que dio lugar a la construcción del Parque Chicano de San Diego, hogar de la colección de murales al aire libre más grande de los Estados Unidos, ejemplo de la rica historia de resistencia y resiliencia de la comunidad mexicoamericana.

Barrio Logan, uno de los vecindarios chicanos más antiguos de San Diego, una vez rebosaba de familias y se extendía hasta la gloriosa Bahía de San Diego. Pero con el paso de los años, la comunidad perdió su playa y acceso a la bahía debido a la construcción de fábricas, deshuesaderos, y una carretera interestatal que dividió el barrio y obligó a miles de personas a abandonar sus hogares. Luego, en 1970, los residentes descubrieron que el equipo que creían que construiría un parque --tal como la ciudad les había prometido hace años-- en realidad comenzaba la edificación de una estación de policía. Entonces supieron que era hora de hacer oír sus voces. El barrio se levanta invita a los lectores a unirse a la valiente joven activista Elena y sus vecinos durante su exitosa ocupación de tierras y más allá, cuando los residentes de Barrio Logan se juntaron para construir el colorido parque que se convertiría en el corazón de la comunidad chicana de San Diego.

Meet Rosie Fuentes - an inquisitive, adventurous, bilingual 5-year old girl ready to discover the world beyond her house's walls.


"Meet Rosie Fuentes" is the introductory book of the latest PBS' preschool series "Rosie's Rules".

An endearing introduction to the supertastical world of Rosie Fuentes, her bilingual Mexican American family and all her discoveries of the world, one preschool catastrophe at a time. A great way to introduce readers to the wow-mazing world of Rosie, but also the perfect book for all Rosie's Rules fans out there.

A bilingual English/Spanish book and a great resource for all littles learning Spanish!

A Cuban American family is sent into a tailspin when the ailing matriarch confesses the first of several shocking secrets to her daughter before undergoing heart surgery in this tender and twisty debut novel.

Monica Campo is pregnant with her first child when, moments before being wheeled into emergency heart surgery, her mother confesses a long-held secret: Monica's father is not the man who raised her. But when her mother wakes up and begins having delusional episodes, Monica doesn't know what to believe--whether the confession was real or just a channeling of the telenovela her mother watches nightly.

In her despair, Monica wants to speak with only one person: her ex-boyfriend of five years, Manny. She can't help but worry, though, what this says about her relationship with her fiancé and father of her unborn child.

Monica's search for the truth leads her to a new understanding of the past: the early eighties when her parents arrived from Cuba on the famous Mariel boatlift, and the tumultuous seventies, a decade after Castro's takeover, when some people were still secretly fighting his regime--people like her mother and the man she claims is Monica's real father. Tell It to Me Singing is a story that takes readers from Miami to Cuba to the jungles of Costa Rica and, along the way, explores the question of how and to whom we belong, how a life is built, and how we know when we're home.

Somos Nopales has been called beautiful, powerful, and chingón. It's the poetic journey of the son of a Mexican immigrant written as he navigates a world where American, Mexican, and Mexican-American cultures collide, co-mingle, and occasionally cooperate. The book serves as a tour into a Nepantlero heart, moving in and among the in-between spaces where the poet often finds himself. Along the journey, readers will meet Vega's family along with other characters which enrich the South Texas narrative. Poems touch on subjects including: identity, immigration, family history, and Chicano culture.

Osito wants to play, but his fur is growing slowly and he's got the shivers. His new friend thinks covering this baby bear with honey and a coat of wildflowers is a good idea. Osito does get warm, but then the bees arrive, and he has to make a run for it!

This charming story by Lisa María Burgess is set in the mountains that traverse the US and Mexico, and takes inspiration from her childhood in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua. In making the vibrant collages, Susan L. Roth created Osito and much of the landscape with tree bark paper, which has been made in Mexico since precolonial times. This story is bilingual for young readers, in English and Spanish.

Baby Bear quiere jugar, pero su pelo está creciendo muy lentamente: y eso lo hace temblar de frío. Su nueva amiga cree que cubrir a este osito con una capa de miel y flores silvestres es una buena idea. Con seguridad se sentirá calientito. Pero entonces las abejas llegan, y Baby Bear tiene que salir corriendo para escapar!.

Esta historia, escrita por Lisa María Burgess, sucede en las montañas de la Sierra Madre que cruza los Estados Unidos y México, y se inspira en su infancia en la Sierra de Chihuahua.

En la creación de sus hermosas ilustraciones, Susan L. Roth ha hecho a Baby Bear y gran parte del paisaje con el papel amate de corteza de árbol, que se ha hecho en México desde la época pre-colonial. Esta historia para niños y jóvenes, es bilingüe, en inglés y español.