Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
“The Latina in me is an ember that blazes forever.”
– Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
National Hispanic Heritage Month is annually celebrated from September 15 to October 15 to recognize the contributions and influence of Hispanic and Latino/a/x Americans to the history, culture, and achievements of the United States. The theme for 2024 is “Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together.”
See below for select VSCS Libraries materials by Hispanic and Latino/a/x authors and filmmakers, or that explore the culture and achievements of Hispanic and Latino/a/x Latino/a/x American communities in the United States and the challenges they have faced (and still do) in our country.
A sampling of recent or noteworthy books by Hispanic and Latino/a/x authors or that explore Hispanic and Latino/a/x American culture and history. All electronic titles are available to read online and our physical titles may be requested for pick-up at a VSCS library or sent to your home.
An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights .
The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento's achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader.
Women banana workers have organized themselves and gained increasing control over their unions, their workplaces, and their lives. Bananeras recounts the history and growth of this vital movement and shows how Latin American woman workers are shaping and broadly reimagining the possibilities of international labor solidarity.
In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity, Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball's Latin/o American players--who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB--as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence.
Bilingual education is usually framed as a tool of antiracism. In Becoming the System, author Nelson Flores challenges that framework by examining the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights Era in the United States has served to maintain rather than challenge racial hierarchies.
This Pura Belpré Award-winning picture book is a bilingual ride through the joyous history of Children's Day/El día de los niños.
Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity.
Jorge Luis Borges is one of the seminal figures in twentieth-century literature. His influence on the art of narrative and on the very way people think about writing has been incalculable. All postwar fiction, from García Márquez to Fuentes, Updike to Barth, Calvino to Eco, bears Borges’s imprint--in spite of the fact that Borges did not write a single novel.
Dalia Magaña's Building Confianza demonstrates that effective doctor-patient communication in Spanish requires that practitioners not only have knowledge of Spanish but also have transcultural knowledge of Latino/a values and language use. Using linguistic analysis to study real-time doctor-patient interactions, Magaña probes the role of interpersonal language and transcultural competency in improving patient-centered health care with Spanish-speaking Latino/as, highlighting successful examples of how Latino/a cultural constructs of confianza (trust), familismo (family-orientation), personalismo (friendliness), respeto (respect), and simpatía (kindness) can be deployed in medical interactions.
Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom
Based on interview data, life testimonios, and Chicana feminist theories, The Chicana/o/x Dream profiles first-generation, Mexican-descent college students who have overcome adversity by utilizing various forms of cultural capital to power their academic success.
Originally published in 1987 and revised in 2004, Compañeras speaks with the voices of Latina lesbians who are puertorriqueñas, chicanas, cubanas, chilenas, hondureñas, brasileñas, colombianas, argentinas, peruanas, costarricenses, mexicanas, ecuatorianas, bolivianas, dominicanas, and nicaragüenses; women who met to speak about what it implies to be both Latina and lesbian in our communities, whether we live in Latin America or the US.
Thirty essays on the central artists, movements, and themes of Latin American art, from the Mexican revolution to the present.
The Latinx population has experienced fast growth and is highly diverse, for example, in terms of immigration status, being born in the United States or other countries of origin, cultural variation, skin color, and language preference. Access to linguistically and culturally relevant services is crucial yet extremely limited. Assessment is an essential aspect of ethical mental health practice and has significant implications at the time it is conducted as well as in the future.
(Fiction) Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow.
Since 2007, Afro-Puerto Rican women have been revising the foundational myths of the island and the diaspora to create a new vision of family as a national allegory that includes powerful Black protagonists. Novelists Mayra Santos-Febres and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa tell the diaspora's history, beginning with trans-Atlantic slavery.
A sweeping history of the Latinx experience in the United States. The first new edition in ten years of this important study of Latinos in U.S. history, Harvest of Empire spans five centuries--from the European colonization of the Americas to the 2020 election.
Gardening at the Margins tells the remarkable story of a diverse group of neighbors working together to grow food and community in the Santa Clara Valley in California. Based on four years of deeply engaged ethnographic field research via a Participatory Action Research project with the people and ecosystems of La Mesa Verde home garden program, Gabriel R. Valle develops a theory of convivial labor to describe how the acts of care among the diverse gardeners--through growing, preparing, and eating food in one of the most income unequal places in the country--are powerful, complex acts of resistance.
From the author of The House on Mango Street, a richly illustrated compilation of true stories and nonfiction pieces that, taken together, form a jigsaw autobiography--an intimate album of a beloved literary legend.
Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Columbia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the Untied States are waiting for her.
The updated, fifth edition of the widely used introductory Spanish textbook designed specifically for health care professionals
Latin America and Existentialism is a preliminary intellectual history, prioritising literature and contextualising Latin American philosophical contributions from the 1860s to the late 1930s, decades that coincide with the canon's foundational years.
Despite representing roughly 16 percent of incarcerated women, Latina women and girls are often rendered invisible in accounts of American crime and punishment. In Latinas in the Criminal Justice System, Vera Lopez and Lisa Pasko bring together a group of distinguished scholars to provide a more complete, nuanced picture of Latinas as victims, offenders, and targets of deportation.
This book brings together the most influential and widely known writings of Vicki L. Ruiz, a leading voice in the fields of Chicana/o, Latina/o, women's, and labor history. For nearly forty years, Ruiz has produced scholarship that has provided the foundation for a rich and nuanced understanding of the ways in which Chicanas and Latinas negotiate the structures impinging on their everyday lives.
What does it mean to be Latinx? This pressing question forms the core of Latinx Belonging, which brings together cutting-edge research to discuss the multilayered ways this might be answered.
Going against the false perception that all Latinx views on the Bible are homogeneous, the contributors in this book use different hermeneutic perspectives to interpret the New Testament.
Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom, a critical ethnography, describes the first year of a teacher-founded charter high school and presents a case-study of compulsory Spanish heritage language instruction with two Spanish-language teachers, one English dominant and the other Spanish dominant.
Interweaving family stories more enchanting than any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon.
Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories--but first she'd have to get off the stairs and join the dance.
In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, the outsider intersects with discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The essays in this volume address questions of outsider identities and how these identities are shaped by mainstream myths around Chicanx and Latinx young people, particularly with the common stereotype of the struggling, underachieving inner-city teens.
This volume is being published at a critical time in U.S. history and serves as a comprehensive and much-needed update to what is known about Latinx health. As both the United States and Latinx subgroups experience demographic shifts, it is critical to examine the current epidemiology of Latinx health, as well as the factors influencing the health and well-being of this growing population.
With the reader, students explore the sociohistorical formation of Latinos as a distinct panethnic group in the United States, delving into issues of class formation; social stratification; racial, gender, and sexual identities; and politics and cultural production.
Long after the Mexican-American War brought the Southwest under the United States flag, Anglos and Hispanics within the region continued to struggle for dominion. From the arrival of railroads through the height of the New Deal, Sarah Deutsch explores the cultural and economic strategies of Anglos and Hispanics as they competed for territory, resources, and power, and examines the impact this struggle had on Hispanic work, community, and gender patterns.
(Fiction) It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro 'Prieto' Acevedo, are bold-faced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying, Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn, while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's power brokers.Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy.
(Fiction) One Hundred Years of Solitude is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
"Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States, and also one of the most rapidly growing. Composed as a direct address to the young people who identify or have been classified as "Latino," Our Migrant Souls is the first account of the historical and social forces that define Latino identity.
This book questions the reliance on melodrama and spectacle in social performances and cultural productions by and about migrants from Mexico and Central America to the United States. Focusing on archetypal characters with nineteenth-century roots that recur in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries - heroic saviors, saintly mothers and struggling fathers, martyred children and rebellious youth - it shows how theater practitioners, filmmakers, visual artists, advocates, activists, journalists, and others who want to help migrants often create migrant melodramas, performances that depict their heroes as virtuous victims at the mercy of evil villains.
Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, Xiomara Batista has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. She pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers--especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.
In Radical Health Julie Avril Minich examines the potential of Latinx expressive culture to intervene in contemporary health politics, elaborating how Latinx artists have critiqued ideologies of health that frame wellbeing in terms of personal behavior. Within this framework, poor health—obesity, asthma, diabetes, STIs, addiction, and high-risk pregnancies—is attributed to irresponsible lifestyle choices among the racialized poor.
Written for all gaming enthusiasts, this book fuses Latinx studies and video game studies to document how Latinx masculinities are portrayed in high-budget action-adventure video games, inviting Latinxs and others to insert their experiences into games made by an industry that fails to see them.
A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this "gripping memoir" (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family.
How do we understand the tendency for Latinos to underutilize certain social services and what types of outreach and intervention strategies are beginning to remedy this longstanding problem? How are Latino psychosocial and health problems shaped by historical and current conditions of acculturation and adjustment, social stratification, ethnic/racial identity development, diversity within Latinos, and politics and social policy? And what are the best and most promising practices for addressing Latino psychosocial and health problems and how could they be improved?
The first English-language collection of Latina/x caregiving testimonios, this volume gives voice to diverse Chicana/x and Latina/x caregiving experiences. Bringing together thirteen first-person accounts, these testimonios speak to the tragic flaws in our health-care system and the woefully undervalued labor of providing care to family and community.
Within a trans-embodied framework, this anthology identifies transmovimientos as the creative force or social mechanism through which queer, trans, and gender nonconforming Latinx communities navigate their location and calibrate their consciousness.
The widely recognized "Dreamer narrative" celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of "deserving" immigrants.
When Language Broke Open collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community. By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas.
In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, the anarchist effort to promote free thought, individual liberty, and social equality relied upon an international Spanish-language print network. These channels for journalism and literature promoted anarchist ideas and practices while fostering transnational solidarity and activism from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles to Barcelona.
A sampling of recent films or noteworthy by Hispanic and Latino/a/x filmmakers or that explore Hispanic and Latino/a/x American culture and history. Videos can be from the library streaming video databases: Kanopy and Films on Demand.
If you haven't accessed Kanopy before, learn how to set up your account in this FAQ.
1997 53 min.
Directed by a schoolteacher, this film became a lightning bolt in the immigration debate as the Rockefeller Foundation labeled it "One of the most important films on American race relations." Hoover Elementary is located in Pico-Union, known as the 'Ellis Island' of Los Angeles. After the passage of Proposition 187 into law, teacher Laura Angélica Simón feared she would be forced to turn in her undocumented students to the INS. She was equally disturbed by the support the Proposition was receiving from teachers, even though it would harm their own students. Armed with borrowed equipment, Simón began chronicling this troubled and divisive chapter at Hoover Elementary.
2013 2 1 hr. episodes
In I Learn America five resilient immigrant teenagers come together at the International High School at Lafayette and struggle to learn their new land. The International High School is a New York City public school dedicated to serving newly arrived immigrant teenagers, with more than 300 students speaking two-dozen languages from 50 countries.
2014 1 hr. 29 min.
The Immigration Paradox takes a critical and in depth look at one of the most divisive issues in human global history–immigration. After encountering an immigrant crossing the Arizona desert, Emmy Award Winner and Filmmaker Lourdes Lee Vasquez set out to understand why people would risk their lives to come to the U.S. Her quest takes a shocking twist when she musters enough courage to cross the line at a protest and has an encounter with whom she believed was her enemy. From there on her journey, spanning 7 years searching for answers and solutions to this complex social issue, takes her and the audience to places never before considered in the immigration debate.
2000 1 hr. 58 min.
Drawing on interviews with more than fifty major personalities from a broad cross-section of disciplines, this tour de force both analyzes and celebrates the growing influence of Latino culture in the U.S. Featured guests include artist Andrés Serrano, poet Pedro Pietri, composer Luis Dias, dancer Paloma Herrera, actor Guillermo Díaz, fashion designer Willey Esco, photographer Mariluz Gordillo, radio host Paco de Radio Mega, TV producer Gamelier de Jesus, Newsweek editor Verónica Chambers, and Washington Post journalist Jaime Manrique, who share their personal and professional experiences of being of Latino descent in America today.
2013 6 53 min. episodes
The Latino Americans (PBS) was the first major documentary series for television to chronicle the rich and varied history and experiences of Latinos, who have helped shape the United States over the last 500-plus years and have become, with more than 50 million people, the largest minority group in the U.S.
2012 Three 1 hr. 25 min. episodes
Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and among the most diverse -- accounting for one-sixth of all Americans and tracing their origins to more than 20 countries. They are also a rising force in American politics. Yet across the American media landscape, from the broadcast airwaves to cable television and Hollywood film, the reality and richness of the Latino experience are virtually nowhere to be found. In Latinos Beyond Reel, filmmakers Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun examine how US news and entertainment media portray -- and do not portray -- Latinos.
1984 2 hr. 10 min.
Diego Echeverría's Los Sures skillfully represents the challenges of its time: drugs, gang violence, crime, abandoned real estate, racial tension, single-parent homes, and inadequate local resources in Los Sures, a Puerto Rican barrio in Brooklyn. Five different people living in this Brooklyn neighborhood, are the focus of five episodes in this documentary. As seen through the eyes and ears of each of the barrio's five inhabitants, the litter-strewn streets and crumbling tenements representative of the worst urban blight cannot completely dominate the human spirit.
2006 1 hr. 8 min.
Starting in the 1980s the U.S. and Mexican governments initiated a trade agreement allowing components for everything from batteries, IV tubes, toys to clothes to be imported duty-free into Mexico, assembled there and then exported back duty-free as finished consumer goods for sale in the U.S. Tijuana became known as the television capital of the world, ‘TV-juana.’ Globalization promised jobs, and working class Mexicans uprooted their lives to flock to the northern frontier in search of better paying work. After a decades long boom in 2001, Tijuana suffered a recession as corporations chased after even cheaper labor in Asia. When the Sanyo plant where Carmen worked for six years moved to Indonesia, they tried to avoid paying the legally mandated severance pay. Carmen became a promotora, or grassroots activist, challenging the usual illegal tactics of the powerful transnationals that are poisoning their workers and the barrios they inhabit.
Celebrate the rhythms of Latin music with the Raices Jazz Orchestra. Hosted by Sheila E., the film showcases original compositions and arrangements of jazz standards, such as “Eye of the Hurricane” by Herbie Hancock, as well as performances by artists including Richard Bona and Anaadi.
2013 1 hr. 6 min.
As a 9 year-old second grader, Lupe had been forced to remain in the first grade for three years, not because of her academic performance but solely because she was Mexican American. She was one of eight young students who testified in a federal court case in 1956 to end the discriminatory practice (Hernandez et al. v. Driscoll Consolidated Independent School District), one of the first post-Brown desegregation court cases to be litigated. Stolen Education portrays the courage of these young people, testifying in an era when fear and intimidation were used to maintain racial hierarchy and control. The students won the case, but for almost sixty years the case was never spoken about in the farming community where they lived despite its significance.
2017 1 hr. 12 min.
Illuminating the untold stories of the Chican@ Movement with a focus on events in Colorado and New Mexico, the film engages student activism, police repression, and issues of identity, land, and community that still resonate in Chican@ struggles today. Through interviews with those who shaped the movement and rare historical footage, the film offers a window into a dynamic moment in history.
2016 53 min.
Political empowerment for Latinos in the United States has always been difficult. A Mexican-American butcher's son from Texas, Willie Velasquez questioned the lack of Latino representation in his city's government, propelling him into a lifelong battle to gain political equality for Latinos. This documentary examines obstacles Latinos had to overcome to obtain representation, and addresses issues facing Latinos today.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
