Join the Book in Common Community Read Challenge and read Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’ in preparation for the author’s visit to campus on April 10.
Community Read Challenge 1
By March 25
- Get your copy of Our Migrant Souls and read the following chapters: “Prologue: Our Migrant Souls,” “Empires,” “Walls,” and “Beginnings” (pages 1-53).
- Join the Four-Week Book Club, beginning March 25 and attend the first discussion on March 25 from noon–1 p.m. in the Arts and Humanities Building, Room 227.
- Look at discussion questions for the “Prologue,” “Empires,” “Walls,” and “Beginnings.”
- Plan on attending the panel “‘What Are You?’: Negotiating Hispanic/Latinx Identities” on March 27 at 5:30pm in ARTS 150 (Recital Hall).
- Get your ticket for the Book in Common talk by Héctor Tobar, April 10, 7:30 p.m. at Laxson Auditorium (tickets $27, youth age 17 and under $17, free for Butte College and Chico State students).
Featuring Dr. Gloria Lopez, History Department:
As Tobar suggests, “we can begin the exploration of our ‘identity’ by understanding the connections between this larger story and the communities that have formed us,” (page 12). Gloria Lopez brings this understanding to her teaching, mentoring, research, and advocacy work. Lopez is an assistant professor of history and a first-generation college graduate and Latina scholar. She serves as faculty-in-residence at El Centro Latinx Resource Center. In situating the impact of this book and the power of stories, Lopez notes:
As of fall 2024, our campus is home to 14,581 students and approximately 5,555 (38.1%) of them are Hispanic/Latino-identifying students. As a Hispanic-Serving Institution we have a responsibility to serve these students and one way of doing that is to see them, to understand their lived-experiences, and to honor their stories. Right now, Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls is one of the best resources at our disposal to help us better serve our students because representation matters.
Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, and media culture, Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of “Latino” as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States. In the pages of this book, Tobar gives voice to the anger and the hopes of young Latinx people who have seen Latinidad transformed into “hateful tropes” and who have faced insults and microaggressions because of their identity. Tobar tells us that he wrote Our Migrant Souls for young people who identify or have been classified as “Latino” to help them see themselves in the historical and social forces that shape the “Latino” experience in the twenty-first century.
From Lopez’s “How Their Story and My Experience Becomes Our Story”:
Identity is historical, political, cultural, and personal. How often have you been asked, Where are you from? Where are your parents from?
My mother was born in San José de la Parrilla, a village in Durango, Mexico, and her family moved to the borderlands when she was still very young. She first crossed the Paso del Norte International Bridge connecting Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, at the age of thirteen as a child domestic servant in 1958. At the time, her father was away for long periods of time working as a Bracero on the railroads of the Pacific Northwest. My grandfather was a Mexican migrant chasing seasonal work where he could find it, but it wasn’t enough. As the second oldest and one of nine children, my mom was sent to work. Her family’s survival depended on it. Once a parent, my mom made the choice to illegally remain in the United States in the 1970s. She occupied multiple jobs, and a couple of different names. The last one before she carved out her path to citizenship was, Gloria _____. Her story of becoming a U.S. citizen is her story of hope.
My father emigrated from Santa Ana, El Salvador, at some point in 1977. His mother had been forced to leave over ten years earlier as their family of four struggled to survive on meager wages my grandmother earned harvesting coffee. It was just not enough. My grandmother left her three children with her mother. My dad was the eldest of three and only ten years old at the time. His siblings were his responsibility. Was it worth it? The sacrifice “paid off” when my grandmother was able to secure an asylum claim for my dad in the mid-1970s. His childhood story is his to hold. He has never shared his story and likely never will. But he might tell you about coming to Los Angeles as a resident alien and working as a “permanent resident” until his retirement. It is his story of living on the margins and being invisible in the United States.
Their different paths eventually led them to Los Angeles in the 1980s where immigration authorities regularly raided their workplace and healthcare workers denied them basic services. One of them was arrested during one of these raids but was released the same day. I was born in Los Angeles and raised in the Westlake neighborhood just west of downtown. This was then, and remains today, one of the most densely populated areas of the city. It is home to the largest Central American population in the nation, and this is where I learned most about my cultural heritage in an American context. The rest came from regular trips across the U.S./Mexico border to visit my mom’s family in Ciudad Juarez. Being raised in a multiethnic household made me an outsider in three cultures—never American enough (wrong ethnicity/race), nor Mexican enough (wrong accent), and certainly not Salvadoran enough (never visited El Pulgarcito).
Just like my parents, I left home. I had the privilege of a college admission to accept, so I pursued it knowing nothing about the process or even why I was going. I started to ask questions and I’ve never stopped. Do we belong? Can I belong?
What’s in a Name? Gloria was my mom’s legal working name when my parents met. My dad wanted to keep the name in our family, so when I was born, the shortlist was simple—Gloria. Odds are my last name, Lopez, was anglicized by hospital staff, but my parents never expressed concern because my dad rarely spelled his name with an accent.
I’ve asked him about this, twice. The first time, I was a teenager and my uncle, his brother, had pointed out that I was spelling my name wrong. I then noticed that my grandmother, my aunt, and my uncle all used the accent in López, whereas my dad did not. My dad explained that he had never had more than a second or third grade education and he could not remember who taught him how to spell his name. But since we all get a choice, we’d keep it, he said. I accepted. I revisited the question in graduate school. This time, we discussed how my name embodied our family’s experience and their immigrant story. We talked about so many moments when we’d been treated as outsiders—being harassed at McArthur Park (“Go back to Mexico!”); being denied opportunities to rent/buy a home; being perceived as “just not smart enough.” It was up to me, he assured, but to remember that it was my choice, not theirs. That day, I realized he was right—this is our story. In the process of becoming a historian, I realized that the personal is historical context of our lived experience and this is our American story. This is how we belong.
I am a Historian. I am a Latina. I am an American. I am of Salvadoran and Mexican descent. We are a first-generation immigrant family. Negotiating your identity and cultural heritage is a lifelong process.
| “Race is an invention of long-dead ideologues and long-discredited scientists who collected skulls and told fairy tales about them. Perhaps you have sensed this already, as you walk about the culturally diverse spaces of North America. Real human beings and their bodies and their faces and their idiosyncrasies don’t fit into the coloring books that the United States has created to illustrate what race means. Race is a story we tell ourselves about one another. In the case of people of Latin American descent, that story was born from a history of conquest and exploitation, and from our own acts of resistance to exploitation and prejudice. You and I, and countless authors and activists, use ‘Latino’ or ‘Latinx’ or ‘Hispanic’ to express an alliance among peoples, a shared experience. But in the intimate spaces of your friendships and your homes, you are not inclined to use these terms. When you are asked the annoying question ‘What are you?’ you are more likely to answer with something more specific and more satisfying, something closer to your lived experiences.” (pages 9-10) | “La raza es una invención de ideólogos que murieron hace tiempo y de científicos ya desacreditados que coleccionaban cráneos y contaban cuentos de hadas sobre ellos. Quizás ya lo hayas percibido al pasear por los espacios culturalmente diversos de Norteamérica. Los seres humanos reales y sus cuerpos, sus rostros y sus idiosincrasias no encajan en los libros para colorear que Estados Unidos ha creado para ilustrar lo que significa la raza. La raza es un relato que nos contamos unos a otros. En el caso de las personas de ascendencia latinoamericana, ese relato nace de una historia de conquista y explotación, y de nuestros propios actos de resistencia a la explotación y los prejuicios. Tú y yo, e innumerables autores y activistas, utilizamos ‘latino’ o ‘latinx’ o ‘hispano’ para expresar una alianza entre pueblos, una experiencia compartida. Pero en los espacios íntimos de nuestras amistades y nuestros hogares, no nos sentimos inclinados a utilizar estos términos. Cuando te hacen la molesta pregunta ‘¿Qué eres?’, es más probable que respondas con algo más especificó y más satisfactorio, algo más cercano a tu experiencia vivida.” (páginas 9-10) Traducción de Laura Muñoz Bonilla y Tiziana Laudato |
Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. Our Migrant Souls won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction, the Zócalo Book Prize awarded to a nonfiction work that explores community, human connectedness, and social cohesion, and it was named to best of the year lists by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Time, and NPR, among others. In addition to Our Migrant Souls, Tobar is the author of the critically acclaimed Deep Down Dark, The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. Tobar is a professor of English and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.
