Starred Review ALA Booklist (Mon Nov 06 00:00:00 CST 2023)

Starred Review "What do we pass on to our children when we call ourselves Latino?" This question of legacy is central to Tobar's (The Last Great Road Bum, 2020) eye-opening investigation into Latin American heritages, whether identified as Latinx, Latin@, Latine, or otherwise. As the son of Guatemalan immigrants, the question is personal for Tobar, who treats this inquiry with the same rigor and care that enlivens his journalistic nonfiction and historical fiction. In his quest for answers, Tobar travels from Los Angeles to his childhood home in Guatemala, dials back time to encounter imperialist and colonial exploits, and speaks with immigrants, neighbors, and family. Each chapter extends the notion of Latinidad by centering around a different theme. In "Empire," Tobar quotes dialogue from Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021) that equally applies to the lived experiences of Central and South American peoples, "The outsiders ravage our lands in front of our eyes. Their cruelty to my people is all I've known." In "Secrets," Tobar sees in Frida Kahlo a figure of "German-Jewish and Oaxacan-Indigenous descent [who] wears huipiles and Tehuantepec headdresses," and he traces the complicated implications of Kahlo's commodification and absorption into mainstream commercial culture. Timely, intelligent, and generous, this is a must-read from Pulitzer Prize winner Tobar.

Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews (Mon Nov 06 00:00:00 CST 2023)

A pensive examination of the many ways there are to be Latinx in America.Novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Tobar, the son of Guatemalan immigrants and a native of Los Angeles, begins on a paradoxical note: Whereas terms such as Latino, Latinx, and Hispanic are expressions "that are said to describe our ‘ethnicity' or ‘common cultural background,' " the White majority reduces them to refer to "race," a parsing that, in practice, always imposes an inferior designation. "Throughout this country's history," writes the author, "the lives of people today known as ‘Latino' have been shaped by the American tradition of creating legal categories applied to the ‘nonwhite.' " A fan of pop culture, Tobar likens such terms to words like Vulcan or Wookie, explaining, with a nod to Junot Díaz, that history provides context to movies such as Dune (slavery), X-Men (racist classification), and Star Wars (colonialism). It's a matter of some irony, he adds, that his hometown is both the most Latinx city in the U.S. and the center of an entertainment industry "that makes billions of dollars telling empire fantasy stories." To broaden his perspective, Tobar travels widely across the country, finding perhaps unlikely centers of Latinidad in little towns in Pennsylvania and suburbs in Georgia as well as unmistakably Cubano Florida. Even if these enclaves are culturally quite distinct at home, they are reduced to the same non-Whiteness in the U.S., some suspect and some praised as "model" immigrants yet all sharing an "emotional commonality." On completing his travels, he returned to LA to find that it resembled less a monolithic Latinx capital than "the encampments of dozens of different tribes." While they share some cultural features, they have all been victimized by capitalism and racism. Tobar's travels and meditations are altogether provocative and thoroughly well thought through, his account sharply observed and elegantly written.A powerful look at what it means to be a member of a community that, though large, remains marginalized.

School Library Journal Starred Review (Fri Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2024)

Tobar's ( The Last Great Road Bum ) meditation on what it means to be Latinx—a term the author deems as imprecise as it is transitory—in America is a rousing, brilliantly written book that defies genre. It is at times a memoir, at others a plea for mainstream America to recognize the essential roles that immigrants and the families of immigrants play in the infrastructure of American life, and at others a deeply researched and erudite exploration of American history through the lens of what it means to be an immigrant in this country. This book is a must-read for anyone who calls themselves an American, regardless of their "legal status." Tobar expertly paints a picture of the complexity of Latinx identity as well as intersecting identities (such as Blaxican, Nuyorican, or "Cuban and Canadian Irish, from Vancouver") that make up the diaspora of migrants and their families. It is an exploration of an oft-ignored or infantilized "race" of people who are treated as an undercaste of American society. This should be mandatory reading for anyone who champions human rights. VERDICT Purchase for all American history, biography, and ethnic studies collections.— Amy Shaw

Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

A pensive examination of the many ways there are to be Latinx in America.Novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Tobar, the son of Guatemalan immigrants and a native of Los Angeles, begins on a paradoxical note: Whereas terms such as Latino, Latinx, and Hispanic are expressions "that are said to describe our ‘ethnicity' or ‘common cultural background,' " the White majority reduces them to refer to "race," a parsing that, in practice, always imposes an inferior designation. "Throughout this country's history," writes the author, "the lives of people today known as ‘Latino' have been shaped by the American tradition of creating legal categories applied to the ‘nonwhite.' " A fan of pop culture, Tobar likens such terms to words like Vulcan or Wookie, explaining, with a nod to Junot Díaz, that history provides context to movies such as Dune (slavery), X-Men (racist classification), and Star Wars (colonialism). It's a matter of some irony, he adds, that his hometown is both the most Latinx city in the U.S. and the center of an entertainment industry "that makes billions of dollars telling empire fantasy stories." To broaden his perspective, Tobar travels widely across the country, finding perhaps unlikely centers of Latinidad in little towns in Pennsylvania and suburbs in Georgia as well as unmistakably Cubano Florida. Even if these enclaves are culturally quite distinct at home, they are reduced to the same non-Whiteness in the U.S., some suspect and some praised as "model" immigrants yet all sharing an "emotional commonality." On completing his travels, he returned to LA to find that it resembled less a monolithic Latinx capital than "the encampments of dozens of different tribes." While they share some cultural features, they have all been victimized by capitalism and racism. Tobar's travels and meditations are altogether provocative and thoroughly well thought through, his account sharply observed and elegantly written.A powerful look at what it means to be a member of a community that, though large, remains marginalized.

Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer winner Tobar (The Last Great Road Bum) explores in this probing, heartfelt essay collection the promises and contradictions inherent within Latino identity. Aiming to help young Latinos “untangl the roots of the racist ideas about us,” Tobar interweaves autobiographical reflections on growing up in L.A. and visiting his family in Guatemala with profiles of undocumented immigrants; cultural analyses of how Latinos are portrayed in American films, television, and literature; and historical vignettes on the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, the annexing of New Mexico and California, the rise of the Chicano Movement, the “militarization” of the U.S. border with Mexico, and more. Throughout, he highlights the diversity of Latinos (“Latino people are brown, Black, white, and Indigenous, and they are European, Asian, and African. Some of us speak excellent Spanish, but many more of us do not”) and fiercely critiques the “static, one-dimensional images” of suffering immigrants that saturate U.S. journalism. Lyrical and uncompromising, this is a powerful call for all Americans to “dedicat our energy and our intellects to creating new ways of being in the world.” Agent: Jay Mandel, WME. (May)