Latino Politics

In this compelling, behind-the-scenes account, former top CIA officer and Cuba expert Brian Latell examines the extraordinary Castro brothers and the impending dynastic succession of Fidel's younger brother, Raul. Exploring the brothers' remarkable relationship, he reveals how Fidel and Raul have collaborated, divided responsibilities, and resolved disagreements for more than 46 years, a challenge to the notion that the little-known Raul has been an insignificant player.

They Forged the Signature of God is an enthralling fictionalized account of the recent and tumultuous history of the Dominican Republic. The story follows three seminary students trying to divine their proper paths in life amid a social climate marked by political repression and instability. Virato Sencion delivers an exacting take on his country's recent political history, and his book has become a best seller in Latin America.

Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact with indigenous people, Mexican culture followed the Spanish colonial frontier northward and put its distinctive mark on what became the southwestern United States. Shaped by their Indian and Spanish ancestors, deeply influenced by Catholicism, and often struggling to respond to political and economic precarity, Mexicans play an important role in United States society even as the dominant Anglo culture strives to assimilate them.

Written by a prize-winning NPR veteran who spent years covering Latin America, this blend of biography, history, and political reporting details the events that lead to the American invasion of Panama.

Marxists guerillas, right-wing paramilitary, and the Colombian government each have their own agenda. Who would have guessed a meeting of the minds would take place under the helpful auspices of communist Cuba? And that these battle-scarred leaders would give reporters and missionaries the opportunity to challenge some of their core philosophies and even pray with them?

Peru, the 1980s and 1990s: It was a cruel, bloody and terrifying era. The rebels of Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"), founded by philosophy professor, Abimael Guzman, slaughtered vilagers in the mountains and hung dogs from power lines, their carcasses canvases for Maoist slogans. The government responded with a corrosive mix of assasination, bribery and intrigue which brought down the rebel leader but triggered the fall of the president.

Este es un testimonio sobre los 18 años que viví cerca del presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador, al ser pareja de su entonces jefe de prensa César Yáñez. Ellos dos son los protagonistas de esta historia llena de traiciones políticas, ambiciones personales, infidelidades, abusos laborales, corrupción y autoritarismo. Mi propósito es evidenciar cómo el poder ha sido el gran amor y la obsesión de López Obrador, y cómo el odio y el resentimiento han sido el alimento que lo sostiene.

On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, had just begun to work on an extensive development plan to improve living conditions in Haiti.

En Pensar Medio Oriente, Maruan Soto Antaki plantea preguntas esenciales para entender el mundo árabe(¿arabe es sinónimo de islámico? ¿Es indisociable el Islam del terrorismo? ¿Qué tan profundas son las raíces de los conflictos?) Ahora, centra su atención en un ámbito más cercano: México. Para entender Medio Oriente, debíamos dirigir nuestra mirada al lenguaje, pues ahí está el corazón de la cultura árabe. En el caso de México, hay que hacer lo mismo.

As he prepares to recite the Declaration of Independence before his eighth grade social studies class in California, the thing Francisco has feared for 10 years finally happens. La migra, the immigration police, come to his classroom and pick him up for deportation to Mexico. Soon back in the United States with a "green card", Francisco struggles through adolescence, working two or three jobs a day and striving to excel at school.

In this illuminating work, immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are concepts that were created to exclude and exploit. With a focus on US policy, she probes how people, especially Mexican and Central Americans, have been assigned this status—and to what ends.

You’ve heard of Pablo Escobar, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and Rafael Caro Quintero. Their names conjure ghoulish images of bloody streets, white powder, bundles of weed, and a particular flavor of machismo unique to ruthless druglords. But what of the drugladies, las narcas? For the first time, investigative reporter Deborah Bonello takes you behind the curtain to introduce the women at the helm of organized crime south of the US-Mexico border.

Historian and journalist Tony Perrottet chronicles the events of the Cuban Revolution and the figures at the center of the guerrilla uprising: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and the scrappy band of rebel men and women who followed them.

Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores - until, at age 17, a deadly threat from the region’s brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they’ve ever known. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA.

Kensington, Philadelphia, is distinguished only by its poverty. It is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized families in the United States. This is the story of their coming-of-age, which is beset by violence—the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the drug trade. In Kensington, eighteenth birthdays are not rites of passage but statistical miracles.

Witchcraft has made a comeback in popular culture, especially among feminists. A growing subculture of BIPOC witches, led by Afro-Caribbean immigrants, Indigenous Americans, and other witches of color, is reclaiming their ancestral traditions and contributing their voices to the feminist witchcraft of today.

Havana is Cuba's soul: a mix of Third World, First World, and Other World. After over a decade of visits as a teacher, researcher, and friend, Karen Dubinsky looks past political slogans and tourist postcards to the streets, neighborhoods, and personalities of a complicated and contradictory city. Her affectionate, humorous vignettes illustrate how Havana's residents - old communist ladies, their skeptical offspring, musicians, underground vendors, entrepreneurial landlords, and poverty-stricken professors - go about their daily lives.

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. Here, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Forcing us to confront this history, America for Americans explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America.

Young Latinos across the United States are redefining their identities, pushing boundaries, and awakening politically in powerful and surprising ways. Many - Afrolatino, indigenous, Muslim, queer, and undocumented, living in large cities and small towns - are voices who have been chronically overlooked in how the diverse population of almost 60 million Latinos in the US has been represented. No longer.

When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby US border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one of the most heavily policed sites in America. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. She learned English, watched Friends, and, after having a baby at 16, dreamed of teaching dance and moving with her son to New York City. But life had other plans.