Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by Reading Great Books

Perfect time to diversify our reading and discover a new favorite author

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

Hispanic Heritage Month begins on September 15th and ends on October 15th. Yes, it’s kind of strange that it’s not a traditional month, but it overlaps between two months. The reason for that is that five Latin American countries celebrate their independence day during this time.

For us as writers and readers, it can be a great time to diversify our reading and try books written by Latino authors, and we have so many to choose from.

It brings me a lot of pleasure to say that because when I started publishing, most of the Latino authors who were available to read were literary authors, and they were not easy to find.

At the time, I had read Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ulitma. Victor Villasenor’s Rain of Gold, Richard Rodriguez’s non-fiction book The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Luis Rodriguez had published a few poems and a couple of novels that I had not read yet. And the only Latina I’d read was Sandra Cisneros, who had about five publications when my first novel was released in 2000.

So, when I was an unpublished writer, or even earlier when I was a young teen looking for books that might reflect my life as a Hispanic kid growing up in America, I didn’t find any. And there were definitely no commercial fiction or fun books that I could find at a bookstore that featured Latinos.

I was excited to publish my first novel for a Latino romance line that would celebrate the various Latino cultures throughout the U.S. I saw this as the first attempt by publishers to include Latinos into the norm. The books were about normal American Latinos doing everyday things, like falling in love, going to work, and having children, but there was a Latino twist and spirit to the books. The books were not political or about being Latino; they simply reflected a more realistic view of American society, which included a growing Hispanic population.

After the 2000s, when publishers realized there was a market for books written by Latino authors, more writers started to “appear” meaning that they were given the opportunity to get published.