Celebrate Afro-Latino voices with the UnidosUS reading list

As Black History Month draws to a close, it’s important to remember that celebrating Black history and Black voices as well as making sure that we stay informed goes beyond one month a year.

This year, we have compiled a reading list of Afro-Latino authors. Their experiences, contributions, and personal stories show just how complex and beautiful Latinidad truly is.

There is fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, and more below, ensuring that there is something for everyone to enjoy.

• Alan Pelaez Lopez:
  • Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien
  • to love and mourn in the age of displacement
• Ariana Curtis:
  • “Identity as Profession: On Becoming an African American Panamanian Afro-Latina Anthropologist Curator.” Chapter in Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism
• Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa:
  • Daughters of the Stone

• Dr. Nancy López:
  • Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education
• Elizabeth Acevedo:
  • Clap When You Land
  • With the Fire on High
• The Poet X
  • Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths
• Evelio Grillo:
  • Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir
• Jaquira Díaz:
  • Ordinary Girls
• Juan Francisco Manzano:
  • The Life and Poems of a Cuban Slave
• Junot Díaz:
  • The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
  • Drown
• Marie Vieux-Chauvet:
  • Dance on the Volcano
• Naima Coster:
  • Halsey Street
  • What’s Mine and Yours
• Piri Thomas:
  • Down These Mean Streets

• Raquel Cepeda:
  • Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
• Tony Medina:
  • My Old Man Was Always on the Lam
• Veronica Chambers:
  • Mama’s Girl
• Various Co-Authors:
  • The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. Edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores.