National Hispanic Heritage Month, observed from Sept. 15 through Oct. 15, recognizes the histories, cultures and contributions of Hispanic and Latino communities in the United States and the many ways they have shaped American life over generations.
The observance begins in mid-September to coincide with the anniversaries of independence for several Latin American countries. Beyond its historical roots, Hispanic Heritage Month offers an opportunity to explore the complexity of identity and how language, family traditions and cultural exchange influence individual and collective experiences.
This month’s collection brings together works that examine Hispanic and Latino histories and perspectives across disciplines and genres. Engage with these resources to discover stories that may be unfamiliar, deepen your understanding of experiences across these diverse communities and consider their continuing impact on American society and culture.
Special thanks to our Materials Processing Coordinator, Leah Zande, for compiling the list.
Hispanic Medal of Honor Recipients: American Heroes
Lanning, Michael Lee (2022)
"La Valentia, el valor, la bravura." 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.”
Based on meticulous research, Lanning has assembled authoritative accounts of these heroic individuals and their deeds of valor, from the American Civil War through the current campaign in the Middle East. This clear and vigorous narrative—derived from enlistment records and other public documents, newspaper accounts, archival sources, and interviews with the families of the honorees—presents brief biographies that include details of the recipients’ lives before and—in the case of those who survived—after their active-duty service. Lanning also includes the text of the citation from each recipients’ Medal of Honor ceremonies and gripping accounts of the battlefield heroics that earned them the ultimate military honor from a grateful nation.
"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. - Publisher's Description
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Hispanic Roots of the Hollywood Western
Gladstein, Mimi; Lozano, Susana (2025)
"Hispanic Roots of the Hollywood Western" explores how the Spanish history of the American Southwest influenced a movie genre that became a worldwide phenomenon: the Western. Numerous aspects of the Hispanic heritage of the Old West appear in Westerns, including Spanish-language place names, Spanish architecture, and Hispanic characters. This book explores these elements through the lens of two archetypal Western protagonists: the Cisco Kid and Zorro. These two characters starred in books, radio shows, and movies throughout the twentieth century, eventually becoming a natural part of American popular culture. They sometimes acted as heroes, sometimes as antiheroes, but in both cases, they helped to create a joyful and positive image in the American collective unconscious of what it meant to be Hispanic in the Wild West. These representations are part of the American cinematographic legacy; to forget them would be to lose a part of our collective identity.
Exploring the Hispanic origins of early Westerns is also key to understanding Westerns that came later, such as Sergio Leone’s films and Clint Eastwood in his poncho. The role played by Spain itself continued to be significant, as multiple locations (including Madrid, Barcelona, and Almería) were converted into shooting locations for Westerns throughout the 1950s–1970s. Some of these films were internationally recognized as universal masterpieces of cinematography, like the Dollars Trilogy.
This book is essential not only for anyone interested in the origins and development of Westerns but also for those who are interested in what meant to be Hispanic in the western United States in past centuries and what it means to be American today. - Publisher's Description
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Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba
Rivera-Rideau, Petra (2024)
As a fitness brand, Zumba Fitness has cultivated a devoted fan base of fifteen million participants spread across 180 countries. In "Fitness Fiesta!" Petra R. Rivera-Rideau analyzes how Zumba uses Latin music and dance to create and sell a vision of Latinness that’s tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving.
Rivera-Rideau focuses on the five tropes that the Zumba brand uses to create this Latinness: authenticity, fiesta, fun, dreams, and love. Closely examining videos, ads, memes, and press coverage as well as interviews she conducted with instructors, Rivera-Rideau traces how Zumba Fitness constructs its ideas of Latinx culture by carefully balancing a longing for apparent authenticity with a homogenization of a marketable “south of the border”-style vacation. She shows how Zumba Fitness claims to celebrate Latinx culture and diversity while it simultaneously traffics in the same racial and ethnic stereotypes that are used to justify racist and xenophobic policies targeting Latinx communities in the United States. In so doing, Rivera-Rideau demonstrates not only the complex relationship between Latinidad and neoliberal, postracial America but also what that relationship means for the limits and possibilities of multicultural citizenship today. - Publisher's Description
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Death & Dying in Hispanic Worlds: The Nexus of Religions, Cultural Traditions, and the Arts
Andrist, Debra (2020)
The dispassionate intellectual examination of the concepts of death & dying contrasts dramatically with the emotive grieving process experienced by those who mourn. Death & dying are binary concepts in human cultures. Cultural differences reveal their mutual exclusiveness in philosophical outlook, language, and much more. Other sets of binaries come into play under intellectual consideration and emotive behavior, which further divide and shape perceptions, beliefs, and actions of individuals and groups. The presence or absence of religious beliefs about life and death, and disposition of the body and/or soul, are prime distinctions. Likewise the age-old binary of reason vs. faith.
To many observers, the topic of death and dying in the Hispanic cultural tradition is usually limited to that of Mexico and its transmogrified religious festival day of Dia de los Muertos. The studies presented in the ten chapters, and editorial introductions to the themes of the book, seek to widen this representation, and set forth the implications of the binary aspects of death and dying in numerous cultures throughout the so-called Hispanic world, including indigenous and European-derived beliefs and practices in religion, society, art, film & literature. Contributions include engagement with the pre-Hispanic world, Picassos poetry, cultural norms in Cuba, and the literary works of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Underlying the arguments presented is Saussurean structuralist theory, which provides a platform to disentangle cultural context in comparative settings. - Publisher's Description
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Latina Histories and Cultures: Feminist Readings and Recoveries of Archival Knowledge
Feu López, M. Montserrat; Padilla, Yolanda (2023)
This collection of academic essays introduces new research on Latina histories and cultures from the mid-nineteenth century to 1980. Examining a wide range of source materials, including personal and institutional archives, literature and oral history, the authors of the fifteen articles use transnational approaches and Latina feminist theory to remind us of a principle that is still too often forgotten: that sex and gender should be centered as crucial problematics in the study of the long history of Latina/o/x literature and culture. Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors MarÃa Amparo Ruiz de Burton and MarÃa Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s.
The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge. In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines. - Publisher's Description
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Building the Apollo Capsules: An Engineer's Memoir of the Moonshot Program and Its Debt to Hispanic Team Members
De La Rosa, Jim (2023)
This firsthand account of the development of the Apollo 11 mission gives a behind-the-scenes look at the 1969 moon landing mission from an engineer's perspective. The technical problems and solutions of designing a capsule to carry three astronauts--Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins--safely to the moon and back are covered in detail from the author's point of view. The contributions of Latino personnel in the Apollo program are described. - Publisher's Description
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The Schlager Anthology of Hispanic America: A Student's Guide to Essential Primary Sources
Sánchez, Aaron (2023)
"The Schlager Anthology of Hispanic America" offers a modern, original sourcebook covering Hispanic American history from the 1100s to the present day. While presenting the essential primary sources from Hispanic American history, from iconic figures such as César Chávez to court cases including Hernandez v. Texas, this anthology also emphasizes often-marginalized voices, from women to those in the LGBTQ community.
In addition, document texts are abridged to remain brief and accessible, even to struggling readers (including ESL students), while activity questions range in difficulty from basic to more advanced. Featuring the contributions of numerous scholars, "The Schlager Anthology of Hispanic America" covers more than 150 milestone sources from Hispanic American history. - Publisher's Description
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The Spanish Language in the United States: Rootedness, Racialization, and Resistance
Urciuoli, Bonnie; Delgado, Daniel; Feagin, Joe; Cobas, José (2022)
"The Spanish Language in the United States" addresses the rootedness of Spanish in the United States, its racialization, and Spanish speakers’ resistance against racialization.
This novel approach challenges the "foreigner" status of Spanish and shows that racialization victims do not take their oppression meekly. It traces the rootedness of Spanish since the 1500s, when the Spanish empire began the settlement of the new land, till today, when 39 million U.S. Latinos speak Spanish at home.
Authors show how whites categorize Spanish speaking in ways that denigrate the non-standard language habits of Spanish speakers―including in schools―highlighting ways of overcoming racism. - Publisher's Description
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Race and Identity in Hispanic America: The White, the Black, and the Brown
Reid-Merritt, Patricia; Rodriguez, Michael (2020)
This book offers a historical and comparative overview of the evolution of racial classifications in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
The Hispanicization of America is precipitating a paradigm shift in racial thinking in which race is no longer defined by distinct characteristics but rather is becoming synonymous with ethnic/cultural identity. Traditionally, assimilation has been conceived of as a unidirectional and racialized phenomenon. Newly arrived immigrant groups or longstanding minority/indigenous populations were "Americanized" in confining their racial and ethnic natures to the private sphere and adopting, in the public sphere, the cultural mores, norms, and values of the dominant cultural/racial group. In contrast, the Hispanicization of America entails the horizontal assimilation of various groups from Spanish-speaking countries throughout the Western Hemisphere and Caribbean into a pan-ethnic, Hispanic/Latino identity that also challenges the privileged position of whiteness as the primary and exclusive referent for American identity.
Instead of focusing on one Hispanic group, ethnic identity, or region, this book chronicles the development of racial identity across the largest Hispanic groups throughout the United States. - Publisher's Description
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Chicago Latina Trailblazers: Testimonios of Political Activism
Hernández, Rita; Villarreal Sosa, Leticia; Gutiérrez, Elena; Castillo, Ana; Cerda, Maria; Chico, Carmen; Figueroa, Aracelis Flecha; Giachello, Aida Luz Maisonet; Gonzales, Mary; López, Ada Nivia (2024)
Mexican American and Puerto Rican women have long taken up the challenge to improve the lives of Chicagoans in the city’s Latino/a/x communities. Rita D. Hernández, Leticia Villarreal Sosa, and Elena R. Gutiérrez present testimonies by Latina leaders who blazed new trails and shaped Latina Chicago history from the 1960s through today.
Taking a do-it-all attitude, these women advanced agendas, built institutions, forged alliances, and created essential resources that Latino/a/x communities lacked. Time and again, they found themselves the first Latina to hold their post or part of the first Latino/a/x institution of its kind. Just as often, early grassroots efforts to address issues affecting themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods grew into larger endeavors. Their experiences ranged from public schools to healthcare to politics to broadcast media, and each woman’s story shows how her work changed countless lives and still reverberates across the entire city.
An eyewitness view of an unknown history, "Chicago Latina Trailblazers" reveals the vision and passion that fueled a group of women in the vanguard of reform. - Publisher's Description
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From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750-1820
Frank, Ross (2023)
The unique arts-and-crafts tradition of the American Southwest illuminates this economic and social history of colonial New Mexico, casting new light on the development of New Mexico's Hispanic community and its changing relationship with Pueblo Indians. Ross Frank's analysis of Pueblo Indian pottery, Pueblo and Spanish blankets, and Spanish religious images―or santos―links economic change to social and cultural change in this region. Using these cultural artifacts to gauge shifts in power and status, Frank charts the creation of a culturally innovative and dominating Hispanic settler―or vecino―community during the final decades of the eighteenth century.
Contrary to previous views of this period as an economic backwater, Frank shows that Spanish New Mexico instead experienced growth that tied the region closely to colonial economic reforms of the Spanish empire. The resulting economic boom dramatically altered the balance of power between the Spanish settlers and the Pueblo Indians, giving the vecinos the incentive and the means to exploit their Pueblo Indian neighbors. Frank shows that the vecinos used different strategies to take control of the Pueblo textile and pottery trade. The Hispanic community began to define its cultural identity through the economic and social subordination of the Pueblo Indians.
Connecting economic change to powerful cultural and social changes, Frank provides a new understanding of this "borderlands" region of northern New Spain in relation to the Spanish colonial history of Mexico. At the same time, "From Settler to Citizen" recovers the previously unexplored history of an important Hispanic community. - Publisher's Description
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Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History
Ferrer, Elizabeth (2021)
Whether at UFW picket lines in California's Central Valley or capturing summertime street life in East Harlem Latinx photographers have documented fights for dignity and justice as well as the daily lives of ordinary people. Their powerful, innovative photographic art touches on family, identity, protest, borders, and other themes, including the experiences of immigration and marginalization common to many of their communities. Yet the work of these artists has largely been excluded from the documented history of photography in the United States.
Through individual profiles of more than eighty photographers from the early history of the photographic medium to the present, Elizabeth Ferrer introduces readers to Latinx portraitists, photojournalists, and documentarians and their legacies. She traces the rise of a Latinx consciousness in photography in the 1960s and '70s and the growth of identity-based approaches in the 1980s and '90s. Ferrer argues that in many cases a shared sense of struggle has motivated photographers to work purposefully, driven by a deep sense of resistance, social and political commitments, and cultural affirmation, and she highlights the significance of family photos to their approaches and outlooks. Works range from documentary and street photography to narrative series to conceptual projects. "Latinx Photography in the United States" is the first book to offer a parallel history of photography, one that no longer lies at the margins but rather plays a crucial role in imagining and creating a broader, more inclusive American visual history. - Publisher's Description
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In the Time of Sky-Rhyming: How Hip Hop Resonated in Brown Los Angeles
Calvillo, Jonathan (2024)
Jonathan E. Calvillo explores the rise of Hip Hop on the West Coast and the integral role the Los Angeles Latine community had on the movement-and in turn, Hip Hop's impact on Latines as it became a space for community, expression, and coping with inequality. Building his narrative around grassroots interviews and oral histories, he explores how in the 1980s incoming migrants and local-born Latines joined Black Americans and other minoritized populations to build early underground sites of Hip Hop innovation ahead of the genre's global expansion. - Publisher's Description
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Day of the Dead in the USA, Second Edition: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon
Marchi, Regina (2022)
Honoring relatives by tending graves, building altars, and cooking festive meals has been a major tradition among Latin Americans for centuries. The tribute, "El Día de los Muertos," has enjoyed renewed popularity since the 1970s when Latinx activists and artists in the United States began expanding "Day of the Dead" north of the border with celebrations of performance art, Aztec danza, art exhibits, and other public expressions.
Focusing on the power of public ritual to serve as a communication medium, this revised and updated edition combines a mix of ethnography, historical research, oral history, and critical cultural analysis to explore the manifold and unexpected transformations that occur when the tradition is embraced by the mainstream. A testament to the complex role of media and commercial forces in constructions of ethnic identity, "Day of the Dead in the USA" provides insight into the power of art and ritual to create community, transmit oppositional messages, and advance educational, political, and economic goals. - Publisher's Description
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Neighbor-Homes: Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat Write Hispaniola and the Diaspora
Myers, Megan Jeanette (2025)
"Neighbor-Homes: Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat Write Hispaniola and the Diaspora" analyzes the work of two of the most acclaimed contemporary American and Caribbean authors for the first time in a single book. Extending beyond scholarly approaches to home as a theoretical construct, Neighbor-Homes considers how Alvarez and Danticat inaugurate multiple spaces of belonging for their off- and on-island fictional characters, for their diverse community of readers, and for themselves.
Revealing a more complex and complete understanding of these Hispaniola-rooted authors, the project places Alvarez and Danticat into conversation at a time when the construction of a border wall and racist immigration laws confirm increasing anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic. Neighbor-Homes incorporates correspondence between the two writers to extrapolate diverse narrative representations of Hispaniola and to highlight various themes central to their work and social justice platforms including family relationships, community building, neighbor aesthetics, statelessness, and border solidarity.
"Neighbor-Homes" will help interdisciplinary audiences read Danticat and Alvarez with a more critical eye so that they can more adeptly and profoundly understand Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and their respective diasporas. This important study is an essential read for students and scholars of literature and social justice, cultural studies, history, and politics, as well as Caribbean, Latinx, and African diaspora literatures. - Publisher's Description
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Magical Habits
Huerta, Monica (2021)
In "Magical Habits," Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history.
Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it. - Publisher's Description
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¡Sí, Ella Puede!: The Rhetorical Legacy of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers
Sowards, Stacey (2019)
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.
Referencing the theoretical works of Pierre Bourdieu, Chela Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, Sowards closely analyzes Huerta’s speeches, letters, and interviews. She shows how Huerta navigates the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, language, and class through the myriad challenges faced by women activists of color. Sowards’s approach to studying Huerta’s rhetorical influence offers a unique perspective for understanding the transformative relationship between agency and social justice. - Publisher's Description
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A Handbook of Latinx Art
Aranda-Alvarado, Rocío; Cullen-Morales, Deborah (2025)
"A Handbook of Latinx Art" is the first anthology to explore the rich, deep, and often overlooked contributions that Latinx artists have made to art in the United States. Drawn from wide-ranging sources, this volume includes texts by artists, critics, and scholars from the 1960s to the present that reflect the diversity of the Latinx experience across the nation, from the West Coast and the Mexican border to New York, Miami, and the Midwest.
The anthology features essential writings by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Central American artists to highlight how visionaries of diverse immigrant groups negotiate issues of participation and belonging, material, style, and community in their own voices. These intersectional essays cut across region, gender, race, and class to lay out a complex emerging field that reckons with different histories, geographies, and political engagements and, ultimately, underscores the importance of Latinx artists to the history of American art. - Publisher's Description
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LatinX Voices: Hispanics in Media in the U.S.
Coronado, Katidia Barbara; Kight, Erica Rodriguez (2019)
"LatinX Voices" is the first undergraduate textbook that includes an overview of Hispanic/LatinX Media in the U.S. and gives readers an understanding of how media in the United States has transformed around this audience.
Based on the authors’ professional and research experience, and teaching broadcast media courses in the classroom, this text covers the evolving industry and offers perspective on topics related to Latin-American areas of interest.
With professional testimonials from those who have left their mark in print, radio, television, film and new media, this collection of chapters brings together expert voices in Hispanic/LatinX media from across the U.S., and explains the impact of this population on the media industry today. - Publisher's Description
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Latinas on the Line: Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications
Villa-Nicholas, Melissa (2022)
"Latinas on the Line" provides a compelling analysis and historical and theoretical grounding of the oral histories, never before seen, of Latina information workers in the Bell System from their entrance in 1973 to their retirements by 2015.
Author Melissa Villa-Nicholas demonstrates the importance of Latinas of the field of telecommunications through their own words and uses supporting archival research to provide an overview of how Latinas engage and remember a critical analysis of their work place, information technologies, and the larger globalized economy and shifting borderlands through their intersectional identities as information workers. The book offers a rich and engaging portrait of the critical history of Latinas in telecommunications, from their manual to automated to digitized labor. - Publisher's Description
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