Hispanic Heritage Month

César Chávez, the labor organizer and founder of the United Farm Workers of America, was, perhaps, an unlikely hero. In this biography, his early life is shown to be fairly typical for a boy in a close-knit family of Mexican Americans who worked the land in Arizona and California and endured hardship and discrimination. His story reveals the underside of the American Dream, and his later successes in helping farm workers and building a union to represent them are a testament to something extraordinary in a seemingly ordinary man.

In the 1960s, political tension forces the García family away from Santo Domingo and towards the Bronx. The sisters all hit their strides in America, adapting and thriving despite cultural differences, language barriers, and prejudice. But Mami and Papi are more traditional, and they have far more difficulty adjusting to their new country. Making matters worse, the girls—frequently embarrassed by their parents—find ways to rebel against them.

Roberta Fernández has gathered the best and most representative examples of fiction, poetry, drama and essay currently being written by Latina writers of the United States. The work is arranged by genre, and topics are as varied as the voices and styles of the writers: the challenge of living in two cultures; experiencing marginality as a result of class, ethnicity, and/or gender; Latina feminism; the celebration of one’s culture and its people. Most of the pieces are in English and some are presented bilingually in English and Spanish.

Chronicling the rich and varied history of Latinos in the United States, this companion to the PBS documentary miniseries vividly and candidly tells how the story of Latino Americans is the story of our country. Latino Americans chronicles the rich and varied history of Latinos, who have helped shaped our nation and have become, with more than fifty million people, the largest minority in the United States. The PBS documentary is available in the Films and Film Resources page of this guide.

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs–yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendiá family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women—brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul—this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.

From plays produced on shoestring budgets in the 1970s to today's high-tech performance pieces, Latina theater has emerged as a vibrant art form whose time has come. This anthology showcases this dynamic new genre through the works of established playwrights such as Cherríe Moraga and Dolores Prida as well as talented new playwrights and performers who have emerged in the past decade such as Migdalia Cruz, Elaine Romero, and Monica Palacios.

This three-volume encyclopedia describes and explains the variety and commonalities in Latina/o culture, providing comprehensive coverage of a variety of Latina/o cultural forms—popular culture, folk culture, rites of passages, and many other forms of shared expression.In the last decade, the Latina/o population has established itself as the fastest growing ethnic group within the United States, and constitutes one of the largest minority groups in the nation. While the different Latina/o groups do have cultural commonalities, there are also many differences among them. This important work examines the historical, regional, and ethnic/racial diversity within specific traditions in rich detail, providing an accurate and comprehensive treatment of what constitutes "the Latino experience" in America.

Noted filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño participated in and documented the most important events in the Mexican American civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the farm workers'strikes and boycotts, the Los Angeles school walk-outs, the Chicano Youth Conference in Denver, the New Mexico land grant movement, the Chicano moratorium against the Vietnam War, the founding of La Raza Unida Party, and the first incursion of Latinos into the media. Coming of age during the turmoil of the sixties, Treviño was on the spot to record the struggles to organize students and workers into the largest social and political movement in the history of Latino communities in the United States.

Since the creation of the Medal of Honor by the United States Congress in 1861, sixty Americans of Hispanic heritage have been awarded the nation's highest decoration for bravery and self-sacrifice in combat. In this important new work, Michael Lee Lanning documents what one reader describes as “some of the most extraordinary battlefield exploits ever performed in an American military uniform." Hispanic Medal of Honor Recipients: American Heroes provides the most thorough documentation to date of these courageous Americans and their service to our nation. The work offers a fitting commemoration of their remarkable actions under the direst circumstances, often performed under conditions of discrimination and prejudice, providing inspiration and encouragement for years to come.

Since the 1950s, Latina activist Dolores Huerta has been a fervent leader and organizer in the struggle for farmworkers'rights within the Latina/o community. A cofounder of the United Farm Workers union in the 1960s alongside César Chávez, Huerta was a union vice president for nearly four decades before starting her own foundation in the early 2000s. She continues to act as a dynamic speaker, passionate lobbyist, and dedicated figure for social and political change, but her crucial contributions and commanding presence have often been overshadowed by those of Chávez and other leaders in the Chicana/o movement. In this new study, Stacey K. Sowards closely examines Huerta's rhetorical skills both in and out of the public eye and defines Huerta's vital place within Chicana/o history. Sowards's approach to studying Huerta's rhetorical influence offers a unique perspective for understanding the transformative relationship between agency and social justice.