Hola, Hispanic Heritage Month!

Elisabeth Scott

Reference Librarian/Literacy Projects Coordinator

National Hispanic Heritage Month began earlier this month on the fifteenth. Did you know that, according to population estimates, 3.4% of Mississippi's population identifies as Hispanic or Latino and a whopping 18.5% of the United States's population does the same? In fact, Hispanics are one of the fastest growing minority groups in the nation, and the fastest growing group in the South. We thought it would be fun to tie in this month's reading prompt "Read a Classic" with just a few of our favorite old and new classic Hispanic authors. Check them out below!

 

• Isabel Allende was born in Peru in 1942 to Chilean parents, but now lives in California. She became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2010. Start with her 1982 book The House of the Spirits, which began as a letter to her grandfather.
  
• Rudolfo Anaya was born in New Mexico in 1937. Anaya is one of the grandfathers of Chicano literature and won an American Book Award and a National Medal of Arts. Start with his 1972 classic Bless Me, Ultima, the first in a trilogy of books set in his home state.
  
• Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954 to parents from Mexico/of Mexican descent. She has won an American Book Award and a MacArthur Genius Grant. Start with her second book, The House on Mango Street, a collection of linked vignettes. Cisneros began work on it as a graduate student; it was published in 1984.
• Juan Felipe Herrera was born in California in 1948. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2015-2017 and was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2011. Start with 2008's Half the World in Light.
  
• Oscar Hijuelos was born in New York City in 1951; both his parents were originally from Cuba. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. Start with his prize-winning novel from 1989, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

These five authors can be found at the Mississippi Library Commission, your local public library, and BARD. These are also great places to explore other books written by Hispanic and Latino authors. If you would like to learn more about Hispanic heritage and culture, you should look into what the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, and the National Endowment for the Humanities have put together for you. We hope the next month is filled with revelatory reading and learning for you. Until next time, happy reading!