Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino"

by Héctor Tobar

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

In a powerful exploration of what it means to be Latino, Latina, Latinx, Hispanic, migrant — acclaimed and bestselling author Hector Tobar offers a tender love letter to the “souls of brown folk” in America.

WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
Named One of The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2023
One of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 | A Top Ten Book of 2023 at Chicago Public Library

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.

In Our Migrant Souls, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now.

“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.

Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, and pop culture, Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of “Latino” as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and gives voice to the anger and the hopes of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes and who have faced insult and division—a story as old as this country itself.

Tobar translates his experience as not only a journalist and novelist but also a mentor, a leader, and an educator. He interweaves his own story, and that of his parents’ migration to the United States from Guatemala, into his account of his journey across the country to uncover something expansive, inspiring, true, and alive about the meaning of “Latino” in the twenty-first century.

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.

In Our Migrant Souls, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now.

“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.

Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, and pop culture, Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of “Latino” as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and gives voice to the anger and the hopes of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes and who have faced insult and division—a story as old as this country itself.

Tobar translates his experience as not only a journalist and novelist but also a mentor, a leader, and an educator. He interweaves his own story, and that of his parents’ migration to the United States from Guatemala, into his account of his journey across the country to uncover something expansive, inspiring, true, and alive about the meaning of “Latino” in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374609900
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	57,459
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark, as well as The Last Great Road Bum, The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. Tobar has been a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion section and is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. He has written for The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Los Angeles Noir, Zyzzyva, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/06/2023

Pulitzer winner Tobar (The Last Great Road Bum) explores in this probing, heartfelt essay collection the promises and contradictions inherent within Latino identity. Aiming to help young Latinos “untangl the roots of the racist ideas about us,” Tobar interweaves autobiographical reflections on growing up in L.A. and visiting his family in Guatemala with profiles of undocumented immigrants; cultural analyses of how Latinos are portrayed in American films, television, and literature; and historical vignettes on the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, the annexing of New Mexico and California, the rise of the Chicano Movement, the “militarization” of the U.S. border with Mexico, and more. Throughout, he highlights the diversity of Latinos (“Latino people are brown, Black, white, and Indigenous, and they are European, Asian, and African. Some of us speak excellent Spanish, but many more of us do not”) and fiercely critiques the “static, one-dimensional images” of suffering immigrants that saturate U.S. journalism. Lyrical and uncompromising, this is a powerful call for all Americans to “dedicat our energy and our intellects to creating new ways of being in the world.” Agent: Jay Mandel, WME. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Easily his most personal book. . . Tobar uses his biography sparingly to illustrate larger aspects of Latino experience. He is as likely to quote historians and cultural theorists as he is to cite students, store clerks or an undocumented Trump supporter randomly encountered on the street. . . Tobar takes care to depict Latino life in a universal light, as something easily comprehensible to anyone who has ever felt the pull of a far-off person or place. . . There is power in the refrain of Tobar’s direct address, which gives his writing the feel of warm advice dispensed to youngsters grappling with a sense of self."
—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review

"Tobar’s book should be read in the context of other works that, for more than a century, have tried to elucidate the meaning of latinidad. . . Our Migrant Souls is, therefore, only the latest attempt to pin down an inherently slippery concept. More than these other works, though, it engages in contemporary debates and issues, such as how Latinos have related to Blackness and indigeneity, the question of why some Latinos choose to identify as white, and the political conservatism of certain Latino communities. It is also the most lyrical and literary of the genre, harnessing Tobar’s deep talents as a writer and his fluency in pop culture, and offers a more intimate look into the barrios, homes, and minds of people who, he argues, have been badly, and sometimes willfully, misunderstood."
—Geraldo L. Cadava, The Atlantic

"Tobar interrogates Latino identity with a subversive nuance. He is not writing for the white gaze, instead directly addressing young Latinos."
—Jean Guerrero, Los Angeles Times

"Eye-opening. . . Timely, intelligent, and generous, this is a must-read from Pulitzer Prize-winner Tobar."
—Diego Báez, Booklist

"Lyrical and uncompromising."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The master writer puts on his maestro cap to give us memoir, media criticism, meditation, travelogue, history lesson, and so much more, in a style and pacing with all the brilliant nuances and hues that Latinos exemplify.”
—Gustavo Arellano, author of Ask a Mexican

“Our Migrant Souls is an important contribution to the growing body of work offering answers to a seemingly simple question: What is a ‘Latino’? In precise yet lyrical prose, Héctor Tobar leads readers on a tour of the United States of America, where to be Latine often means to go unseen.”
—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean

“ Héctor Tobar bursts the bubble of colonizing inhumanity contained in the ‘Latino,’ ‘Latinx,’ and ‘Hispanic’ labels. The migrant son Tobar crisscrosses the country to find stories of the buried and reviled, inspired and inspiring humanidad of the one out of every four people in the United States who bears these labels. Our Migrant Souls points to the inevitable reckoning a country deep in denial must undertake.”
—Roberto Lovato , author of Unforgetting

“Unflinchingly clear-eyed, intelligent, and compassionate, Our Migrant Souls is essential reading for all Americans. Héctor Tobar peers into the fractured kaleidoscope of Latinidad and reveals that an identity is forged by history and by each of our unique stories. Generous in its expansive analysis of how empire and constructed ideas of race trickle through our veins, Our Migrant Souls is also heartfelt, poetic, and intimate. Tobar delivers a brilliant, honest, and necessary book about race when we need it most. It is a salve for the times.”
—Carribean Fragoza, author of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You

From the Publisher

04/01/2023

Every day, people from Latin America enter into the United States, and they bring their hopes and dreams with them. Desires for safety and prosperity drive them to leave their ancestral lands and embark on that journey. Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist Tobar (The Last Great Road Bum) dives into the stories of migrants and their families as they explore what it means to relive their memories and mix it with the histories that made those experiences possible. Tobar does not shy away from addressing the interconnectedness of their memories with incidents of racism on U.S. soil. Their stories of humanity, hope, strength, and, at times, brutal grit, take readers from the deck of a steamship docked in the San Francisco Bay to the backyard deck of construction professionals in Georgia. Each story unpeels the layers of each individual's sense of national and cultural identity, the connection to their ancestral pasts, and their visions for future generations growing up in their new country of origin. The passion for social justice is palpable in Tobar's writing. VERDICT Recommended for readers with an interest in sociology, anthropology, political science, and the historical context of various Latin American migrant experiences.—Monique Martinez

Library Journal

★ 03/01/2024

Tobar's (The Last Great Road Bum) meditation on what it means to be Latinx—a term the author deems as imprecise as it is transitory—in America is a rousing, brilliantly written book that defies genre. It is at times a memoir, at others a plea for mainstream America to recognize the essential roles that immigrants and the families of immigrants play in the infrastructure of American life, and at others a deeply researched and erudite exploration of American history through the lens of what it means to be an immigrant in this country. This book is a must-read for anyone who calls themselves an American, regardless of their "legal status." Tobar expertly paints a picture of the complexity of Latinx identity as well as intersecting identities (such as Blaxican, Nuyorican, or "Cuban and Canadian Irish, from Vancouver") that make up the diaspora of migrants and their families. It is an exploration of an oft-ignored or infantilized "race" of people who are treated as an undercaste of American society. This should be mandatory reading for anyone who champions human rights. VERDICT Purchase for all American history, biography, and ethnic studies collections.—Amy Shaw

School Library Journal

★ 2023-03-03
A pensive examination of the many ways there are to be Latinx in America.

Novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Tobar, the son of Guatemalan immigrants and a native of Los Angeles, begins on a paradoxical note: Whereas terms such as Latino, Latinx, and Hispanic are expressions “that are said to describe our ‘ethnicity’ or ‘common cultural background,’ ” the White majority reduces them to refer to “race,” a parsing that, in practice, always imposes an inferior designation. “Throughout this country’s history,” writes the author, “the lives of people today known as ‘Latino’ have been shaped by the American tradition of creating legal categories applied to the ‘nonwhite.’ ” A fan of pop culture, Tobar likens such terms to words like Vulcan or Wookie, explaining, with a nod to Junot Díaz, that history provides context to movies such as Dune (slavery), X-Men (racist classification), and Star Wars (colonialism). It’s a matter of some irony, he adds, that his hometown is both the most Latinx city in the U.S. and the center of an entertainment industry “that makes billions of dollars telling empire fantasy stories.” To broaden his perspective, Tobar travels widely across the country, finding perhaps unlikely centers of Latinidad in little towns in Pennsylvania and suburbs in Georgia as well as unmistakably Cubano Florida. Even if these enclaves are culturally quite distinct at home, they are reduced to the same non-Whiteness in the U.S., some suspect and some praised as “model” immigrants yet all sharing an “emotional commonality.” On completing his travels, he returned to LA to find that it resembled less a monolithic Latinx capital than “the encampments of dozens of different tribes.” While they share some cultural features, they have all been victimized by capitalism and racism. Tobar’s travels and meditations are altogether provocative and thoroughly well thought through, his account sharply observed and elegantly written.

A powerful look at what it means to be a member of a community that, though large, remains marginalized.

Kirkus Reviews