Como agua para chocolate - Laura Esquivel

Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo

Coco Soundtrack (2017)

Rain of gold - Victor Villasenor

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The tortilla curtain - T.C. Boyle

Adán en Edén - Carlos Fuentes

Avenue of mysteries - John Irving

Gritos y susurros II : experiencias intempestivas de 39 mujeres

Summary: Compiled by one of the most controversial and critical analysts of our day, Gritos y susurros II is a fête in which we are invited to hear the most interesting passages of the lives of a diverse group of famous women: writers, actresses, artists, politicians, government employees, business women, chefs, and singers. The texts are educational and liberating. They help us recognize that we need each other to elaborate new forms of understanding and to light up the world as these women have done.
- (Perseus Publishing)

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A house of my own - Sandra Cisneros

Summary: "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 have provided inspiration for her now-classic works of fiction and poetry. But a house of her own, where she could truly take root, has eluded her. With this collection--spanning nearly three decades, and including never-before-published work--Cisneros has come home at last. Ranging from the private (her parents' loving and tempestuous marriage) to the political (a rallying cry for one woman's liberty in Sarajevo) to the literary (a tribute to Marguerite Duras), and written with her trademark sensitivity and honesty, these poignant, unforgettable pieces give us not only her most transformative memories but also a revelation of her artistic and intellectual influences. Here is an exuberant, deeply moving celebration of a life in writing lived to the fullest--an important milestone in a storied career"-- Provided by publisher.
"A book of essays spanning the author's career a[nd] reflecting upon the various homes she's lived in around the world"-- Provided by publisher.

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* By gathering together more than 40 essays and musings written for various occasions and undertakings between 1984 and 2014, Cisneros, beloved author of the novels The House on Mango Street (1984) and Caramelo (2002), has created her first work of nonfiction, a patchwork-quilt memoir resplendent with one hundred color photographs. Her reflections on houses she's lived in and the meaning of home form a unifying motif, along with accounts of her early struggle to envision a way forward as a self-described "American Mexican" and "working-class writer." Cisneros chronicles with profound insights and striking detail family abodes in Chicago and Mexico City, sojourns on a Greek island and in Sarajevo, Venice, and Chiapas, Mexico, and the uproar over her purple house in San Antonio. Cisneros pays passionate homage to her parents and such writers and artists as Gwendolyn Brooks, Elena Poniatowska, Eduardo Galeano, and Astor Piazzolla. She also examines with abrading candor and impish wit gender expectations, sexuality, and her long campaign to become "a woman comfortable in her skin," the corollary to her love of home as sanctuary: "A house for me is the freedom to be." At once righteously irreverent and deeply compassionate, Cisneros writes frankly and tenderly of independence and connection, injustice and transcendence, resilience and creativity, the meaning of home and the writer's calling. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Cisneros will tour the country with this mosaic of autobiographical stories guaranteed to enthrall her many fans. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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Rebozo de aromas - Esther Rizo Campomanes

Rebozo de aromas - Rizo Campomanes, Esther

Summary: A family’s intimate portrait is woven into the social changes that took place between the first half of the 19th century and the Mexican Revolution.




Library Journal Reviews
Rizo Campomanes's debut effort is published at the eve of her 89th birthday. This is the fictionalized story of her family's life from the mid 19th century to the 1920s. The author attended various writing workshops led by established Mexican writers, such as Elena Poniatowska and Monica Lavin, when Lavin recognized the quality of Rizo Campomanes' narrative. Born in Cuba of an exiled Mexican family, Rizo Campomanes here gives voice to her ancestors. Interweaving her own family tree, historical research, and the stories passed on through generations, she relates the past using a rich descriptive language, including Nahuatl. The dramatic story is not told in a linear fashion, although it does begin with an abandoned blonde baby of noble ancestry discovered by childless peasants (the author's great grandfather) and conclude with her mother arriving in Cuba to escape the Mexican Revolution. Notable characters are the author's two grandmothers (after both of whom the author is named): Eloisa, who cures people with psychic powers, and Esther, who remains mute after having left Mexico for Cuba. Rizo Campomanes, an avid reader, thinks of herself as having self-taught skills because she did not finish high school; we can only be grateful that she had the courage and stamina to finish this long-envisioned project.

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Out of their minds - Luis Humberto Crosthwaite

Out of their minds: the incredible and (sometimes) sad story of Ramon and Cornelio - Crosthwaite, Luis Humberto

Summary: Ramon and Cornelio are best friends, driven by boredom as teenagers to start a band. Not just any band. A norteño band, playing God's favorite music. God even pitches in to write the songs. Success, disaster and good music follow.

"Hey, what's up, come a little closer, I have something to tell you," God said to Cornelio. The deal was simple: God would be the silent partner in the norteño band that Cornelio had started with his best friend Ramon. Cornelio would sing and play the bajo sexto, Ramon the accordion, and God would write the songs. Cornelio agreed; he would sell his soul to God.

Success and disaster followed. The band went from playing bars in Tijuana to playing the biggest stadiums in Mexico. Women started fan clubs dedicated to their heroes Ramon and Cornelio. It seemed to Cornelio and Ramon that they had everything, but fame was a cruel mistress. Ramon and Cornelio’s story has some loose parallels to a real Mexican band, but it’s also the apocryphal story of the Beatles and the kids tuning up in the garage down the street.

Luis Humberto Crosthwaite is an award-winning writer, editor, and journalist who teaches at the University of Iowa. His fiction has garnered critical attention for his ability to express the complexities of living on the US/Mexico border. Among his best known books are Estrella de la Calle Sexta, Aparta de mí este Cáliz, Idos de la Mente, Instrucciones para Cruzar la Frontera, and Tijuana: Crimen y Olvido. His translated novels are The Moon will Forever be a Distant Love and Out of their Minds. He is also co-editor of Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots, & Graffiti from the US/Mexico Border.

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All the pretty horses - Cormac McCarthy

All the pretty horses - McCarthy, Cormac

Summary: Cut off from the life of ranching he has come to love by his grandfather's death, John Grady Cole flees to Mexico, where he and his two companions embark on a rugged and cruelly idyllic adventure - (Baker & Taylor)

Publishers Weekly Reviews
This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature. None of McCarthy's previous works, not even the award-winning The Orchard Keeper (1965) or the much-admired Blood Meridian (1985), quite prepares the reader for the singular achievement of this first installment in the projected Border Trilogy. John Grady Cole is a 16-year-old boy who leaves his Texas home when his grandfather dies. With his parents already split up and his mother working in theater out of town, there is no longer reason for him to stay. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride their horses south into Mexico; they are joined by another boy, the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a 14-year-old sharpshooter. Although the year is 1948, the landscape--at some moments parched and unforgiving, at others verdant and gentled by rain--seems out of time, somewhere before history or after it. These likable boys affect the cowboy's taciturnity--they roll cigarettes and say what they mean--and yet amongst themselves are given to terse, comic exchanges about life and death. In McCarthy's unblinking imagination the boys suffer truly harrowing encounters with corrupt Mexican officials, enigmatic bandits and a desert weather that roils like an angry god. Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting. In what is perhaps the book's most spectacular feat, horses and men are joined in a philosophical union made manifest in the muscular pulse of the prose and the brute dignity of the characters. ``What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them,'' the narrator says of John Grady. As a bonus, Grady endures a tragic love affair with the daughter of a rich Spanish Hacendado , a romance, one hopes, to be resumed later in the trilogy. (May) Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information.

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All the pretty horses - Cormac McCarthy

All the pretty horses - McCarthy, Cormac

Summary: Cut off from the life of ranching he has come to love by his grandfather's death, John Grady Cole flees to Mexico, where he and his two companions embark on a rugged and cruelly idyllic adventure. 25,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)


Publishers Weekly Reviews
This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature. None of McCarthy's previous works, not even the award-winning The Orchard Keeper (1965) or the much-admired Blood Meridian (1985), quite prepares the reader for the singular achievement of this first installment in the projected Border Trilogy. John Grady Cole is a 16-year-old boy who leaves his Texas home when his grandfather dies. With his parents already split up and his mother working in theater out of town, there is no longer reason for him to stay. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride their horses south into Mexico; they are joined by another boy, the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a 14-year-old sharpshooter. Although the year is 1948, the landscape--at some moments parched and unforgiving, at others verdant and gentled by rain--seems out of time, somewhere before history or after it. These likable boys affect the cowboy's taciturnity--they roll cigarettes and say what they mean--and yet amongst themselves are given to terse, comic exchanges about life and death. In McCarthy's unblinking imagination the boys suffer truly harrowing encounters with corrupt Mexican officials, enigmatic bandits and a desert weather that roils like an angry god. Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting. In what is perhaps the book's most spectacular feat, horses and men are joined in a philosophical union made manifest in the muscular pulse of the prose and the brute dignity of the characters. ``What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them,'' the narrator says of John Grady. As a bonus, Grady endures a tragic love affair with the daughter of a rich Spanish Hacendado , a romance, one hopes, to be resumed later in the trilogy. (May) Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information.

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Rain of gold - Victor Villasenor

Rain of gold - Villasenor, Victor

Summary: Traces the lives of three generations of the author's family, and recounts the circumstances that led them to emigrate from Mexico to the United States - (Baker & Taylor)



Kirkus Reviews
A writer of Mexican-American heritage (Jury, 1977) tells the engrossing saga of his family's immigration to, and subsequent life in, California in the wake of the Mexican revolution. A sort of Hispanic Roots, the book focuses on three generations as they struggle with poverty and prejudice, love and life. When Villasenor was first contracted to write Rain of Gold, it was to be a ``major'' work of fiction. As he began interviewing his relatives for background material, however, he realized that there was a much more important story to tell: the nonfiction account of his family's history. Unable to convince his publisher to go along with his new plans, Villasenor gave back his $75,000 advance, took a $1,500 advance from a lesser-known house, and set about writing ``a history of a people--a tribal heritage, if you will--of my Indian-European culture as handed down to me....'' It was a brave and rewarding decision. From beginning to end, the chronicle is filled with one remarkable story after another. All have the simple warmhearted quality of family tales told around the kitchen table, yet all are eminently believable. Many episodes have to do with overcoming hardships: A daughter is brutally raped and goes blind; a proud mother is forced to become a beggar to support her children; a son admits to a murder he didn't commit in order to collect money for his family. Others deal with love and God and the ``meaning of life.'' The book is heavy-handed and sketchy at times, and bogs down in the second half, but, overall, it's a page-turner. Perhaps not the definitive Hispanic family epic, but an inspiring, fast-paced tale with a simple, fable-like quality that's often surprisingly moving. Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews

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The hummingbird's daughter - Luis Alberto Urrea

The hummingbird's daughter - Urrea, Luis Alberto

Summary: When sixteen-year-old Teresita, the illegitimate and beloved daughter of a powerful late-nineteenth-century rancher, arises from death possessing the power to heal, she is declared a saint and finds her family and faith tested by the impending Mexican civil war. By the author of The Devil's Highway. - (Baker & Taylor)

Publishers Weekly Reviews
"Her powers were growing now, like her body. No one knew where the strange things came from. Some said they sprang up in her after the desert sojourn with Huila. Some said they came from somewhere else, some deep inner landscape no one could touch. That they had been there all along." Teresita, the real-life "Saint of Cabora," was born in 1873 to a 14-year-old Indian girl impregnated by a prosperous rancher near the Mexico-Arizona border. Raised in dire poverty by an abusive aunt, the little girl still learned music and horsemanship and even to read: she was a "chosen child," showing such remarkable healing powers that the ranch's medicine woman took her as an apprentice, and the rancher, Don Tom s Urrea, took her-barefoot and dirty-into his own household. At 16, Teresita was raped, lapsed into a coma and apparently died. At her wake, though, she sat up in her coffin and declared that it was not for her. Pilgrims came to her by the thousands, even as the Catholic Church denounced her as a heretic; she was also accused of fomenting an Indian uprising against Mexico and, at 19, sentenced to be shot. From this already tumultuous tale of his great-aunt Teresa, American Book Award-winner Urrea (The Devil's Highway) fashions an astonishing novel set against the guerrilla violence of post-Civil War southwestern border disputes and incipient revolution. His brilliant prose is saturated with the cadences and insights of Latin-American magical realism and tempered by his exacting reporter's eye and extensive historical investigation. The book is wildly romantic, sweeping in its effect, employing the techniques of Catholic hagiography, Western fairy tale, Indian legend and everyday family folklore against the gritty historical realities of war, poverty, prejudice, lawlessness, torture and genocide. Urrea effortlessly links Teresita's supernatural calling to the turmoil of the times, concealing substantial intellectual content behind effervescent storytelling and considerable humor. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (May 17) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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The lacuna: a novel – Barbara Kingsolver

The lacuna: a novel - Kingsolver, Barbara

Summary: "The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds--Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s--and whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century's most tumultuous events"--Provided by publisher.

Booklist Reviews
In her first novel in nine years, Kingsolver displays the same ambition she exhibited in her best-selling The Poisonwood Bible (1998). Moving her story between Mexico and the U.S. and covering some 20 years in the life of Harrison William Shepherd, born to a social-climbing Mexican mother and an emotionally distant American father, who eventually divorce, Kingsolver weaves in pointed social commentary on dark moments in the history of both countries. Zelig-like, Shepherd is present at disturbing yet key historical events, including the violent 1933 Bonus March in Washington, D.C. Kicked out of a military academy for a homosexual liaison, Shepherd returns to Mexico; is taken into the household of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the exiled Leon Trotsky; and witnesses Trotsky's assassination. He eventually settles in Asheville, North Carolina, becoming well known as an author of historical fiction and coming to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his leftist leanings. Kingsolver packs her novel with rich detail on everything from underwater caves to the proper way to mix the plaster Rivera uses in his murals, relaying information through a pastiche of letters, newspaper excerpts, and diary entries. As a result, the novel can be slow going, but the final section, devoted to the loving if platonic relationship between Shepherd and his dedicated stenographer, builds to a stunningly moving coda, conveying the tender emotions between two outsiders who have created their own sanctuary in the face of a hostile mainstream culture. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

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Into the beautiful north – Luis Alberto Urrea

Into the beautiful north - Urrea, Luis Alberto

Summary: "Nineteen-year-old Nayeli works at a taco shop in her Mexican village and dreams about her father, who journeyed to the US when she was young. Recently, it has dawned on her that he isn't the only man who has left town. In fact, there are almost no men in the village--they've all gone north. While watching The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli decides to go north herself and recruit seven men--her own 'Siete Magníficos'--to repopulate her hometown and protect it from the bandidos who plan on taking it over."--Provided by publisher.

Booklist Reviews
"*Starred Review* If you are a judo-practicing, butt-kicking 19-year-old Mexican woman in a town with only one youngish man—and he s gay—you might decide to go to El Norte to recruit illegal immigrant men to revive your village. And Naveli, a twenty-first-century female Don Quixote with a three-person posse that includes her gay boss, does exactly that. This wonderfully funny, occasionally sad novel combines elements of the picaresque with the joie de vivre and startling coincidences of a road-trip movie. Urrea s knowledge of immigrant life, the rigors of poverty, and how being poor affects everyday existence provides the gritty details that make characters and places come alive. Sardonic humor, rugged details of the working-class poor, and the exotic, often bizarre characters all contribute to an outstanding reading treat. Fans of Urrea s nonfiction and his Kiriyama Prize winner, The Hummingbird s Daughter (2005), will probably not expect this lush, rollicking novel of quests, self-discovery, and romance. But—once committed to the trip—readers will have no trouble staying till the bittersweet and triumphant end."

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