2024-25 Book in Common

Events

Chapter Discussion Questions

• Prologue
  • Héctor Tobar, a professor at UC Irvine, opens his book with a “string of memories” that his students have shared with him over the years. Tobar derives strength and clarity from these memories, which clearly guide his teaching and writing. How do his students’ “string of memories” intersect with your experiences before entering higher education and as a student or employee at Chico State, Butte College, or elsewhere? How might these memories change or focus your role in higher education?
  • Tobar explains his job as an educator to open for his students “a truth that’s always been there, around [them], unspoken.” (p.7) What is this truth? Why is it so important?
  • Tobar writes that “the racial and ethnic labels of the United States are old and imprecise and illogical; and yet they dominate our lives in the present.” (p.10) When is the first time - and when is the most recent time - that you were asked to indicate your racial or ethnic “label”? Did these experiences feel imprecise and illogical, in the way that Tobar explains on pp.8-12? Have you reflected on the consequences of your answer to one of these questions (for example, on a census or college application)? For Chico State and Butte College employees, how do you/we use student responses about their identity?
  • How does Tobar introduce readers to both the unity/commonality of the “Latino” people/experience, as well as its diversity?
• Chapter 1: Empires
  • The subtitle of the book is A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” but this chapter goes beyond just meditation. How does Tobar use the idea of “Empire” as a storytelling device to introduce the histories, meanings, and myths of “Latino.”
  • Tobar uses Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Dune to help the reader understand the ways that “Empires” have violently shaped the development of “Latino” histories and identities. What are the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors? In your reflection, you might consider Tobar’s conversation with the Salvadoran teenager on pp. 23-24.
  • Why does Tobar insert a short section about his students’ stories about their parents (pp.20-21) in the middle of his reflection on the “Hollywood epic” nature of the immigrant experience? How do the parents’ stories fit into the larger saga, as understood by Tobar and his students?
• Chapter 2: Walls
  • Like last year’s Book in Common, Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed, this chapter focuses upon public memory and commemoration. What is Tobar’s experience at Border Field State Park? And how does he contrast it with Peach Arch Historical State Park on the Canadian Border?
  • Tobar provides numerous histories of “Latino” migration in this chapter, but notes the absence of public commemoration of these histories in “monuments” or “interpretive centers” (p. 37). How/where might “monuments” or “interpretative centers” do justice to the histories of “Latino” migration?
  • Who is Gloria Itzel Montiel? How does Tobar use her history to tell the story of the border, and vice/versa?
  • On pp.40-41, Tobar adopts the “professorial tone” to provide a short history of the border fence, but concludes the chapter with a statement that “Latino people don’t need a lecture to understand the paradox of our place inside United States History” (p. 42). According to Tobar, throughout the chapter, how does the history and memory of the border itself provide an answer to the paradox?
• Chapter 3: Beginnings
  • The publisher describes how Tobar “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 21st century,” and in this chapter Tobar introduces readers to both the “sanitized” and “unsanitized” histories of his family. What “truths” do these stories contain and convey?
  • This chapter also introduces the reader to Los Angeles and Tobar’s East Hollywood childhood barrio. How do the idea and the reality of these two places shape Tobar’s early understanding of “Latino” both during his childhood and in his adult recollections of his childhood?
  • How have memories of the arrival of “young and bold” immigrants influenced family and community histories and identities?
• Chapter 4: Cities
  • Throughout the first part of the chapter, Tobar shows again and again how “the geography of the cities of the United States is an assault on our bodies and our free will.” Focusing especially upon Los Angeles, how/when/why did this “assault” begin, increase, and continue to the present?
  • Throughout the chapter, how does Tobar utilize the four “Grade” zones in a 1939 map produced by the Federal Home Loan Bank (Los Angeles) to explain his family’s story, as well as structural violence against “Latinos” and other migrant or oppressed communities.
  • How does Tobar explain - in deeply emotive and sympathetic language - the significance of the Cholos/Cholas/Cholx, or the earlier Pachucos/Pachucas?
  • Throughout the entire book - but especially towards the end of this chapter - Tobar emphasizes the intersectionality of the migrant experience, noting for instance that “about one quarter of the residence [of Little Saigon] are Hispanic and another quarter are white, according to the census” (pp.68-69). Why is this fact, like others presented in this chapter, so important and significant in Tobar’s explanations of “Latino”?
• Chapter 5: Race
  • James Earl Ray and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. looms over Tobar’s childhood and his understanding of “race” in America. How so? In particular, how does Tobar use James Earl Ray’s racial grievance throughout the chapter to problematize “whiteness”?
  • Tobar writes that “the story of ‘Latino’ people in the United States is a drama that begins on the stage of ‘Black’ and ‘White,’ and all the history and the conflict born of those terms. In this country, ‘race’ hovers over everything that we do” (p.76). How does Tobar explain this conflict, from his use of Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith (p.80) to the origins of the “Caucasian” category, and how does Tobar show “the story of ‘Latino’ people” beginning in this conflict? In other words, what is the “push and pull toward and away from whiteness” (p.88), which Tobar sees as “one of the defining elements of Latino history.”
  • How does Tobar use the intersectionality and mixed race status of “Latinos” and others to both celebrate diversity and undermine illogical “race thinking”?
• Chapter 6: Intimacies
  • Tobar writes that “the drama of white-Latino contact is not yet a part of the United States’ image of itself” (p. 94), but it is a big part of this chapter. How (and where) is “whiteness” manifested, especially in this chapter in Los Angeles, and how do “Latino” people help create the illusion of “whiteness”?
  • How does Tobar connect early-US “race” thinking and laws to later-US ideas and laws about “race” and “aliens”? According to Tobar, what is the through line?
  • On pp.105-10, Tobar conjures the myth of Sisyphus to conceptualize the mighty weight of the challenges facing migrants, but in the end Tobar’s adaptation of the myth reinforces his belief in the transformative power of education. In your response, consider Julia Rodriguez (pp.106-7), Esperanza and Cinthia Monterrosa (pp.109-10), and Tobar and his grandmother (pp.107-9).
• Chapter 7: Secrets
  • Tobar uses the life and art of Frida Kahlo to begin to unravel “the secrets and the unknowns of our family histories” where “our whole past is seen and celebrated in the vivid colors of an oil painting” (p.117). After reading the chapter, look at Kahlo’s My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (1936), and reflect upon both Tobar’s interpretations on pp.114-17 as well as how the painting connects to later parts of the chapter.
  • Tobar writes that “all race and ethnic categories begin with crimes, lies, distortions, secrets, and myths that gloss over the intimacies of family life. This is true of ‘Latino’ and ‘Latinx’ as much as it is of any other category, if not more so” (pp.122-23). How does Tobar define - and explain the limitations of - categories such as “Hispanic,” “Latino” (and “Latinx”), and “Chicano”? How do these categories gloss over the intimacies of family life?
  • How does Tobar use the unstable and criminalized identity of Jews who converted to Catholicism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain to illustrate the “five-century history of cross-racial family intimacies that have been criminalized and shrouded in shame and secrecy” (p.125).
• Chapter 8: Ashes
  • This is a painful chapter, which includes descriptions of genocide, and makes a case that mass killings throughout Latin America and the US-Mexico border have shaped (and continue to shape) “Latino” culture and identity. How does Tobar use the Holocaust and the “violence of empire” in Latin America to introduce the topic of the chapter, and explain the concept of intergenerational trauma?
  • Tobar quotes the anthropologist Jason De León who wrote that, on the US-Mexico border, the US government has created “a killing machine that simultaneously uses and hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert” (132). What does the “horror of mass death” on the border have in common with the other “genocides that created the modern world” (140).
  • Why does Tobar repeatedly emphasize the disintegration of human remains on the US-Mexico border? and how has the “horror of mass death” influenced the identity and psychology of both the perpetrators as well as the surviving victims?
• Chapter 9: Lies
  • What images, stereotypes, and lies about “Latinos” have been created and deployed by both those seeking to help migrants and by those seeking to remove/punish them? What has been the impact of these lies? How has art - both popular art (television) and fine art (museums) - reinforced these lies?
  • For Tobar, the antidote to lies and generalizations is to focus upon the experiences of real, specific, people like himself, his students, and people like Gisel Villagómez. Tobar met Gisel to discuss her experiences as a DACA essential worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, but first she told Tobar “about the day she spent in immigration detention, thirteen years earlier.” Discuss Gisel’s account, her sister’s conclusion that “we have to live like it’s the last day, every day,” and how this chapter supports Tobar’s conclusion that “that’s what it means to be undocumented; and what it means to be Mexican, and Mexican American, and Peurto Rican, and Latino and Latinx” (p.157)
  • Tobar concludes the chapter with a beautiful section about his spouse Virginia Espino - who identifies as Chicano - and provides a glimpse into how they raised their children. How, as a parent, did Tobar finally begin “to understand what the term ‘Latino’ truly meant” (p.164)?
• Chapter 10: Light
  • How does Tobar use the life experiences of Wong Kim Ark throughout this chapter - from start to finish - to compare and contrast with those of “Latinos” in general and with Tobar and his students in particular?
  • Support Tobar’s claim with evidence from the chapter, including not just the stories of his father and uncle Roberto, but those of his students and other relatives also: “I’ve long believed that the novelist I later became was born from listening to those stories” (p.186).
  • For Tobar, how are the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” (book subtitle) inseparable from the meanings, myths, and history of Latin America?
  • What is the significance of the title (“light”), both in pp.189-90 when Tobar describes a beautiful scene in Gualán, but also as a metaphor for this chapter’s important focus of “Latino” memory and identity?
• Chapter 11: Home
  • Throughout the book, Tobar returns again and again to the importance of reading, literacy, and family, and he opens the chapter (pp.195-198) with a final meditation on reading (he is the happiest when he sees his children reading, p.197). How does his remarks about reading - from the New York Public Library to the Los Angeles Public Library - introduce and frame his voyages across the US?
  • Of the places that Tobar visits and describes, do any resonate with your experiences of a particular place? Chico/Butte County?
  • What is the significance of starting this particular trip in Woodburn, Oregon, with Teresa Alonso León, before heading east and south to Florida via the US-Mexico border, and then returning to Los Angeles via New Jersey and Pennsylvania?
  • In Chapter 2, Tobar described his experiences at Border Field State Park, and in Chapter 11 he returns to the theme of critiquing places of memory, in this case at the El Paso Walmart where a monument commemorates (or fails to commemorate) twenty-three people who were killed by a “gunman who targeted brown-skinned people in an act of self-described ethnic warfare” (p.206). Especially for anyone who read last year’s Book in Common - Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed - how could a monument have been created differently to better honor the victims? 
  • Tobar writes, “in a strange way, the trip is making me feel more ‘American’ than ever” (217)? Did you find this surprising? Why or why not?
• Conclusion: Utopias
  • To what extent does the last paragraph of the previous chapter - which described Los Angeles as “a place of wounded people” and the US as “a nation drifting toward civil war” (p.221) - prepare the reader for the first paragraph of this chapter?
  • How does Tobar use the vision/promise/hope of a free queer culture to imagine a more true and just future beyond the violence and injustice of the present and the past?
  • On p.226, Tobar writes that “we attempt to create a new, freer country simply by imagining it, and by enacting a performance of it,” but a few pages later states that “we can’t liberate our migrant souls by good feelings alone” (p.233). Is there a disconnect between these two statements? Why or why not?
  • How does Tobar think about “caste” in this chapter? Why does Tobar pay such close attention to “the homeless” as he imagines a post-racial utopia?
  • Why, of all the “Latinos” who Tobar encountered in the creation of this book, does he choose to conclude the book with “Itzcali”? How does her story encapsulate both this book, as well as the purpose of this chapter?

• Selection Announcement

  We are excited to announce that the Book in Common for 2024-2025 is Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’ by Héctor Tobar (2023).

  Description

  The publisher describes the book as “a direct address to the young people who identify or have been classified as ‘Latino’… [that] 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, leader, and 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 21st century.”

  Why this book?

  We believe Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls will be deeply engaging to students and to a broad audience.  Latinx students make up 37% of Chico State’s student body and over 30% of Butte College’s students identify as Latinx.  Both of our campuses are Hispanic Serving Institutions, and this book will help center the experiences of many of our students, and anchor the servingness of our responsibility as HSIs. This book meaningfully aligns with our strategic priorities, and authentically amplifies our commitments to justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. 

  We received feedback from faculty, staff, students, administrators, and community members, and the enthusiasm to select Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls was robust, passionate, and compelling.  Our Migrant Souls was the strong favorite of respondents to our survey, receiving 43% more recommendations to select as Book in Common than the second-place book.

  Here is a sample of the feedback we received on the public survey and from student focus group readers:

  • This is a beautiful book, written in a poetic style that is equally accessible to faculty, staff, and students. Héctor Tobar provides so many points of access - some tender and some fierce - that will open up crucial conversations at Chico State, Butte College, and in the wider community. We need this book.
  • Hector Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls is an opportunity for us as a campus community to weave together a conversation about Latinidad and what it means to serve our Latinx students at a Hispanic Serving Institution. Too often, we have a conversation about race in a black/white binary and fail to understand that this is a starting point. Latinx communities (of which we are many), as Tobar so cleverly illustrates, do not “fit into a box.” In class I acknowledge that conversations about race/ethnicity and identity are uncomfortable and invite students to see discomfort as a place for growth because they are not alone. As a faculty member of color this feels like a risky position to take every time, but…this is where Tobar will shine. It will help students grow and ask questions. For students who identify as Latinx on our campus, they will be able to see their experiences centered in a way that is not the norm on our campus. Latinx students are in the minority and they feel it every day. So let's take this opportunity to see what it looks like to serve and enrich the opportunity of our "Hispanic" students.
  • We are an HSI with a significant population of students identifying as Latinx. There will be a robust audience for the book--and I believe it is important for ALL readers to be informed about the discussion & complexity of the "Latino/Latina/Latin@/Latinx" set of concepts, the history, and where the conversation is right now.

  Here is a sample of the feedback we received from the Executive Board of Chico State’s Chicano/Latino Council:

  • Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls does not just teach us about the complexities of race, immigration policy, (mis)representation in the media. It goes a step further to create space for students to voice their self-identity assertively; it explores the messiness of how mixed-status families and mixed-race families navigate their place in this country; it combats the erasures of Latinx culture and identity in U.S. history. For our Latinx students, this is an opportunity to ‘see’ themselves (their families, their guardians, and their ancestors) as individuals whose experiences hold a great deal of cultural capital and see it be celebrated. For the rest of our students, this is an opportunity to reflect and nurture awareness of the experiences of their Latinx peers and find common ground.  The personal narratives and examples contained in this book are relatable and accessible for a wide-ranging audience and will allow readers to inch one step closer to being comfortable engaging with questions of race and identity. For all of us, this is an opportunity to question our assumptions, discover something about how we serve our Latinx students, expand our understanding about race past a white-black binary and what it means to describe someone or self-identity as ‘Latino.’