Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” Héctor Tobar

Los Angeles Public Library Podcasts

"'Stories about empire,' Tobar writes, 'move us because they're echoes of the memories that reside deep in our collective consciousness.' Latinos, after all, are people' living with the hurt caused by war and politics, conquest and surrender, revolution and dictatorship.'" —The New York Times "Latino" is the most broadly defined major race in the United States. In Pulitzer-Prize-winner Héctor Tobar's new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino," Tobar recounts his personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a thoughtful reproach to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about "illegals" and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation.