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GHPLD Memoirs for National Hispanic Heritage Month 2025

Created on August 26, 2025, 7:27 pm

Last Updated September 3, 2025, 2:35 pm

"Hispanic Heritage Month is a month-long celebration of Hispanic and Latino history and culture. While we celebrate Hispanic and Latino communites beyond this month, from September 15 to October 15 we give extra recognition to the many contributions made to the history and culture of the United States, including important advocacy work, vibrant art, popular and traditional foods, and much more." (https://latino.si.edu/learn/teaching-and-learning-resources/hispanic-heritage-month-resources/hispanic-heritage-month)

1) The undocumented Americans

Author

Cornejo Villavicencio, Karla

Description

"Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. Her work culminates in a stunning, essential read for our times. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States when she was five years old, Cornejo Villavicencio...

2) A house of my own: stories from my life

Author

Cisneros, Sandra

Description

"From the beloved 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 literary legend's life and career. From the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up and set her groundbreaking The House on Mango Street to her abode in Mexico, in a region where "my ancestors lived for centuries," the places Sandra Cisneros has lived...

3) Illegally yours: a memoir

Author

Agustín, Rafael

Description

"What happens when the all-American high school student discovers he's undocumented? Rafa's parents didn't want him to grow up feeling different because, as his mom told him: "Dreams should not have borders." Rafa had no idea of his immigration status until he tried to get his driver's license during his junior year of high school. Suddenly, his perfectly curated and slightly racist (race-ish, if you will) American life came undone. While his parents...

4) The line becomes a river: dispatches from the border

Author

Cantú, Francisco (Essayist)

Series

Thorndike Press large print popular and narrative nonfiction

Description

""A beautiful, fiercely honest, and nevertheless deeply empathetic look at those who police the border and the migrants who risk - and lose - their lives crossing it. In a time of often ill-informed or downright deceitful political rhetoric, this book is an invaluable corrective."--Phil Klay For Francisco Cantú the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest....

5) Ordinary girls: a memoir

Author

Description

"Jaquira Díaz writes an unflinching account of growing up as a queer biracial girl searching for home as her family splits apart and her mother struggles with mental illness and addiction. From her own struggles with depression and drug abuse to her experiences of violence to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page vibrates with music and lyricism"-- Provided by publisher.

6) Solito: a memoir

Author

Description

"Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago--'one day, you'll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.' Javier's adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone except for a group of strangers...

7) Trejo: my life of crime, redemption, and Hollywood

Author

Trejo, Danny, 1944

Series

Thorndike Press large print biographies and memoirs

Description

"For the first time, the full, fascinating, and inspirational true story of Danny Trejo's journey from crime, prison, addiction, and loss to unexpected fame as Hollywood's favorite bad guy with a heart of gold. On screen, Danny Trejo the actor is a baddie who has been killed at least a hundred times. He's been shot, stabbed, hanged, chopped up, squished by an elevator, and once, was even melted into a bloody goo. Off screen, he's a hero beloved by...

8) Upper Bohemia: a memoir

Author

Herrera, Hayden

Description

"A coming-of-age memoir by the daughter of privileged, artistic, hard-drinking, bohemian parents, set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, Cape Cod, and Mexico"-- Provided by publisher.

9) Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir

Author

Sánchez, Erika L

Description

"From the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, an utterly original memoir-in-essays that is as deeply moving as it is hilariously funny. Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment--a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her...

10) The man who could move clouds: a memoir

Author

Rojas Contreras, Ingrid

Description

"For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Growing up in the Colombia of the 1980's and 1990's in a house where "what did you dream?" was asked in place of "how are you?" her world was laced with prophecy and violence. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with the ability to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As a young girl, Rojas Contreras eavesdropped...

11) Spirit run: a 6,000-mile marathon through North America's stolen land

Author

Series

Thorndike Press large print biographies and memoirs

Description

"Growing up in Raymond Carver country--Yakima, Washington--Noé Álvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother, who 'slouched over a conveyor belt of fruit, shoulder to shoulder with mothers conditioned to believe this was all they could do with their lives.' Escape came in the form of a university scholarship, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, Álvarez struggled to fit in. At nineteen, he learned about a Native American/First...

12) In the dream house: a memoir

Author

Machado, Carmen Maria

Description

The author's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

13) My documents

Author

Zambra, Alejandro, 1975

Description

"My Documents is the latest work from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature, and described by Junot Dâiaz as "a total knockout." Now, in his first short story collection, Zambra gives us eleven stories of liars and ghosts, armed bandits and young lovers--brilliant portraits of life in Chile before and after Pinochet. The cumulative effect is that of a novel--or...

14) First gen: a memoir

Author

Campoverdi, Alejandra

Description

"From former White House aide to President Obama and Harvard graduate, Alejandra Campoverdi, comes a riveting and unflinching memoir on navigating social mobility as a first gen Latina, offering a broad examination of the unacknowledged emotional tolls of being a trailblazer. To be a First and Only in America is a delicate balancing act of surviving where you come from while acting like you belong where you're going. Alejandra Campoverdi has been...

15) Children of the land

Author

Hernandez Castillo, Marcelo, 1988

Description

"With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family's encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his fathers deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his...

16) When I was Puerto Rican

Author

Santiago, Esmeralda

Description

[The author's] story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her warring parents and seven siblings led a life of uproar, but one full of love and tenderness as well. Growing up, Esmeralda learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of the tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. But just when Esmeralda seemed to have learned everything,...

17) In the shadow of the mountain: a memoir of courage

Author

Vasquez-Lavado, Silvia

Description

"When Silvia's mother called her home to Peru, she knew something finally had to give. A Latinx hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. She was deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she'd suffered as a child. Her visit to Peru would become a turning point in her life. Silvia started climbing. Something about the brute force required for...

18) You sound like a White girl: the case for rejecting assimilation

Author

Description

"Nationally bestselling author Julissa Arce interweaves her own story with cultural commentary in a powerful polemic against the myth that assimilation leads to happiness and belonging for immigrants in America. Instead, she calls for a celebration of our uniqueness, our origins, our heritage, and the beauty of the differences that make us Americans. "You sound like a white girl." These were the words spoken to Julissa by a high school crush as she...

19) Our migrant souls: a meditation on race and the meanings and myths of "Latino"

Author

Tobar, Héctor, 1963

Description

"A new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity"-- Provided by publisher. "Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Ȟctor Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to...

20) Black dove: essays on mama, mi'jo, and me

Author

Description

"In this collection of essays, Ana Castillo examines what it means to be a single, brown, feminist parent in a world of mass incarceration, racial profiling, and police brutality. Castillo writes about intergenerational stories from Mexico City to Chicago, and she narrates some of America's social injustices through the lens of motherhood"--