"Each year, Americans observe National Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 to October 15, by celebrating the histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.
The observation started in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week under President Lyndon Johnson and was expanded by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 to cover a 30-day period starting on September 15 and ending on October 15. It was enacted into law on August 17, 1988, on the approval of Public Law 100-402.
The day of September 15 is significant because it is the anniversary of independence for Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on September 16 and September18, respectively. Also, Columbus Day or Día de la Raza, which is October 12, falls within this 30 day period."
This libguide is a collaborative endeavor of the Hay Library and Western's DEI Committee.
(This LibGuide is by no means an exhaustive list of resources, but we do endeavor to keep this list of materials updated.)
Select the individual's name to view their works available in the Hay Library. Select the individual's picture to view their biography information.
Chicano author Rudolfo Anaya (born 1937) has been hailed as one of the most renowned, resourceful and productive of Mexican American writers. His work holds an important place in Chicano literary curricula, with his novels appearing as staples on high school and college reading lists.
Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American author. She is best known for her books The House of Spirits as well as Eva Luna.
Laura Esquivel is a Mexican novelist and television screenwriter whose written work has garnered kind words from both critics and the general public. Her 1980s screenplay, Chido One, El Tacos de Oro, was nominated for Mexico's Ariel award--the equivalent of an Oscar--for best screenplay by the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures. In 1992 the movie version of Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate won ten Ariel awards, including one for Esquivel's screenplay, which was based on her first novel of the same name. The novel proved to be a bestseller in both Mexico and the United States.
In her poetry and prose, Julia Alvarez has expressed her feelings about her immigration to the United States. Although she was born in New York City, she spent her early years in the Dominican Republic. After her family's immigration to America, she and her sisters struggled to find a place for themselves in their new world. Alvarez has used her dual experience as a starting point for the exploration of culture through writing. Alvarez's work voices many of the concerns of Hispanic women and has received critical acclaim.
Select the individual's name to view works about them that are available in the Hay Library or online. Select the individual's picture to view their biography information.
Called "one of the heroic figures of our time" by Robert Kennedy in 1968, César Chávez was a grass-roots labor organizer who rose from the ranks of California migrant workers to form and lead the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA).
As cofounder and first vice president of the United Farm Workers, Dolores Huerta (sometimes referred to as Dolores "Huelga," Spanish for "strike") has been the most prominent Chicana labor leader in the United States.
At age 29 Ocasio‐Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Rita Moreno's versatility as a performer has led to decades of success on stage, screen, and television. She is one of four female entertainers and the first Hispanic entertainer to have won all four of the most prestigious show business awards.
Famously known for tossing a Molotov cocktail during the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots in New York City, Hispanic-American transgender activist Sylvia Rivera (1951-2002) devoted her life to the gay, lesbian, and transgender liberation movements.
Ellen Ochoa became the first female Hispanic astronaut in July, 1990. Ochoa is noted both for her distinguished work in inventions and patents and for her role in American space exploration. She is the veteran of four space shuttle flights. In 2012 Ochoa became the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Dr. Antonia Novello was the first woman and the first Hispanic to become Surgeon General of the United States.
Selena Quintanilla-Perez, known simply as Selena, was a Mexican-American fashion designer and cultural icon known for her booming voice and bold fashion sense. She has often been referred to as the "Queen of Tejano Music," and her career included multiple top selling hits.
Cantinflas (1911-1993) was one of Mexico's most beloved cinematic figures, a masterful comedian who cast himself as the resourceful voice of the common people. With a stream of his trademark nonsense talk, he could neutralize the powerful or work around the most absurd forms of bureaucracy.
Pancho Villa (1878-1923) was a famous Mexican military commander and guerrilla of the warring phase of the Mexican Revolution.
Emiliano Zapata (ca. 1879-1919), Mexican agrarian leader and guerrilla fighter, was the symbol of the agrarian revolution. As a leading figure of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Zapata formed the Liberation Army of the South. His role as courageous revolutionary continues to be honored in Mexico and across the globe.
Frida Kahlo was a bisexual painter, feminist, socialist, and activist. Her work fascinated prominent and diverse artists around the world. The wife of world-renowned Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo forged a place in the art world that was completely her own.
The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism, he established the basis for abstract art.
Call number: 813.54 AN8B 1999
Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past--a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world... and will nurture the birth of his soul.
Call number: 860.8 B644B 2006
As the descendants of Mexican immigrants have settled throughout the United States, a great literature has emerged, but its correspondances with the literature of Mexico have gone largely unobserved. In Bordering Fires, the first anthology to combine writing from both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border, Cristina Garc'a presents a richly diverse cross-cultural conversation. Beginning with Mexican masters such as Alfonso Reyes and Juan Rulfo, Garc'a highlights historic voices such as "the godfather of Chicano literature" Rudolfo Anaya, and Gloria Anzaldoea, who made a powerful case for language that reflects bicultural experience. From the fierce evocations of Chicano reality in Jimmy Santiago Baca's Poem IX to the breathtaking images of identity in Coral Bracho's poem "Fish of Fleeting Skin," from the work of Carlos Fuentes to Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo to Octavio Paz, this landmark collection of fiction, essays, and poetry offers an exhilarating new vantage point on our continent-and on the best of contemporary literature.
Call number: 863 AL54D 1999
From the New York Times bestselling author of The House of the Spirits, Isabelle Allende, comes a passionate tale of one young woman's quest to save her lover set against the chaos of the 1849 California Gold Rush.
Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaquín takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him.
As Eliza embarks on her perilous journey north in the hold of a ship and arrives in the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco, she must navigate a society dominated by greedy men. But Eliza soon catches on with the help of her natural spirit and a good friend, the Chinese doctor Tao Chi'en. What began as a search for love ends up as the conquest of personal freedom.
A marvel of storytelling, Daughter of Fortune confirms once again Isabel Allende's extraordinary gift for fiction and her place as one of the world's leading writers.
Call number: 863.64 AL527H 1982
Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s classic novel is both a richly symbolic family saga and the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country’s turbulent history.
In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende brings to life a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring than the political allegiances that set them at odds. The House of the Spirits not only brings another nation’s history thrillingly to life, but also makes its people’s joys and anguishes wholly our own.
Call number: SPAN 863.08 ES69C 2011
Call number: 863 ES69L, 1993
Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.
Call number: SPAN 741.5944 D749M 2019
Come along to the mysterious world of magical animals with Magalina!
Magalina has just arrived at the cryptozoology camp to learn everything she can about her passion: the study of magical animals!
Along with learning about gorgons, vampires, and fairies, Magalina will meet new classmates. Some will become her friends, and others will become rivals ... And some perhaps something else.
When the mysteries appear to multiply and the students' lives seem to be in danger ... will Magalina be able to uncover what is happening and save her friends?
While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. In the first book-length study written in English, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City, the poet's home after 1940. Pérez-Rosario situates Julia de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s.
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies.
Celebrado desde su publicación inicial como el relato clásico de una muchada del barrio latino de Chicago, La casa en Mango Street has sido elogadio por los críticos, acogido por los niños y sus padres y abuelos y estudiado por todas partes, desde escuelas primarias en las grandes ciudades hasta universidades por todo el país. Ahora por primera vez en una edición en español, traducido por una de las más reconocidas figures literarias de México, La casa en Mango Street está a la disposición de los miles de lectores latinos a quien este libro ha dado voz.
Call number: DVD 791.4372 L627L [2002]
Based on the best-selling novel by Laura Esquival, this internationally popular romantic fable from Mexico centers on a young woman who discovers that her cooking has magical effects. The tale's heroine, Tita, is the youngest of three daughters in a traditional Mexican family. Bound by tradition to remain unmarried while caring for her aging mother, Tita nevertheless falls in love with a handsome young man named Pedro. Pedro returns her affection, but he cannot overcome her family's disapproval, and he instead marries Tita's elder sister. The lovestruck young woman is brutally disappointed, and her sadness has such force that it infects her cooking: all who eat it her feel her heartbreak with the same intensity. This newly discovered power continues to manifest itself after the wedding, as Tita and Pedro, overcome by their denied love, embark on a secret affair. Director Alfonso Arau, Esquival's husband at the time, presents the acts of love and cooking with the same glossy, sensual sheen. Indeed, despite occasional digressions into a magical realist tone, the film often takes on the gloss of Hollywood romance. This combination of traditional melodrama and exotic fairy tale proved extremely popular with audiences, particularly in the United States, where it became one of the highest grossing foreign language films at the time. ~ Judd Blaise, Rovi
Call number: DVD 791.4372 F912F 2003
After being attached to a number of actors, directors, and producers, this long-gestating biography of one of Mexico's most prominent, iconoclastic painters reaches the screen under the guiding hand of producer/star Salma Hayek. Hayek ages some 30 years onscreen as she charts Frida Kahlo's life from feisty schoolgirl to Diego Rivera protégée to world-renowned artist in her own right. Frida details Kahlo's affluent upbringing in Mexico City, and her nurturing relationship with her traditional mother (Patricia Reyes Spindola) and philosophical father (Roger Rees). Having already suffered the crippling effects of polio, Kahlo sustains further injuries when a city bus accident nearly ends her life. But in her bed-ridden state, the young artist produces dozens upon dozens of pieces; when she recovers, she presents them to the legendary -- and legendarily temperamental -- Rivera (Alfred Molina), who takes her under his wing as an artist, a political revolutionary, and, inevitably, a lover. But their relationship is fraught with trouble, as the philandering Rivera traverses the globe painting murals, and Kahlo languishes in obscurity, longing to make her mark on her own. Frida was directed by Julie Taymor, whose Broadway production of The Lion King won her international acclaim. ~ Michael Hastings, Rovi
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