Latin America is home to some of the most powerful true stories in the world. From political upheavals and revolutionary movements to personal memoirs and historical narratives, nonfiction books on Latin America offer essential insights into its diverse cultures, histories, and people.
This list brings together a range of nonfiction works that explore the region from multiple perspectives. Some are written by voices from within the area; others by outsiders who have spent time trying to understand its intricacies.
Enjoy!
Table of Contents
MIGRATION
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis investigates how U.S. policies and regional violence have driven Central American migration to the U.S. The book reveals the political and economic causes behind the migration crisis.
“In the 1980s, administrations in Washington saw Central America through the totalizing prism of the Cold War. Over the next few decades, the fear of the spread of leftism morphed into a fear of the spread of people. A straight line extends between the two, pulled taut during the intervening years of forced emigration, mass deportation, and political expediency. Immigration laws draw sharp boundaries around citizenship and identity, casting this history aside. Politics is a form of selective amnesia. The people who survive it are our only insurance against forgetting.”
The Beast by Óscar Martínez
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail follows Central American migrants as they ride “La Bestia,” the deadly freight trains headed toward the U.S. border. His investigative journalism reveals the violence, exploitation, and courage on one of the world’s most perilous journeys.
“Along the way they will be preyed upon by cartels, police, Mexican immigration authorities, maras and random rural gangs, robbed, enslaved, forced into narco assassin squads, and raped – an estimated eight out of ten migrant women who attempt to cross Mexico suffer sexual abuse along the way, sometimes at the hands of fellow migrants. Migrants are kidnapped en masse by Zetas, with the complicity of corrupted and terrorized local police and other authorities and of treacherous coyotes, so that their families back home or awaiting them in the US can be extorted; meanwhile the captives are tortured, raped and sometimes massacred. Thousands upon thousands of migrants have been murdered in Mexico, and many others die by falling from ‘La Bestia’; as many as seventy thousand, some experts estimate, lie buried along the ‘death corridor’ of the migrants’ trail.”
Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions blends essay and testimony as she reflects on her work translating for unaccompanied child migrants navigating the U.S. immigration system. The book explores bureaucracy, language, and the emotional toll of migration on children and their advocates.
“Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”
The Line Becomes A River by Francisco Cantú
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border follows Cantú’s experience as a U.S. Border Patrol agent and his eventual moral reckoning with the system he served. It interrogates the border’s human cost – on migrants, families, and the people who police it.
“Jung asserts that when we come to perceive ‘the other’ as someone to be feared and shunned, we risk the inner cohesion of our society, allowing our personal relationships to become undermined by a creeping mistrust. By walling ourselves off from a perceived other, we ‘flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness.’”
Solito by Javier Zamora
Solito recounts Zamora’s journey as an unaccompanied child migrant from El Salvador to the U.S. It explores the dangers faced and the hope driving migration.
“Mom likes to call them my ‘angels,’ but I worry that takes away their humanity and their nonreligious capacity for love and compassion they showed a stranger. I never found out what happened to Chele, or to any of the countless others who were with me. I fear they died in the Sonoran Desert. This book is for them and for every immigrant who has crossed, who has tried to, who is crossing right now, and who will keep trying.”
Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas
Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen shares Vargas’s personal experience as an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines to the U.S., challenging misconceptions about immigration. He advocates for a new narrative that recognizes migrants’ humanity.
“Here in the U.S., the language we use to discuss immigration does not recognize the realities of our lives based on conditions that we did not create and cannot control. For the most part, why are white people called ‘expats’ while people of color are called ‘immigrants’? What’s the difference between a ‘settler’ and a ‘refugee’? Language itself is a barrier to information, a fortress against understanding the inalienable instinct of human beings to move. The United States, after all, was founded on this very freedom.”
COLONIALISM & HISTORICAL VIOLENCE
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent exposes centuries of economic exploitation of Latin America by foreign powers and local elites. The book critiques imperialism’s lasting effects on the continent’s development.
“Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others – the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.”
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is a 16th-century account that documents the brutal treatment and mass killings of Indigenous peoples by Spanish colonizers in the Americas. Written as a plea to the Spanish crown, it remains a foundational indictment of colonial violence.
“God made all the peoples of this area, many and varied as they are, as open and as innocent as can be imagined. The simplest people in the world … they are without malice or guile. It was upon these gentle lambs that the Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold, or like tigers and savage lions who have not eaten meat for days.”
DRUGS & THE ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE
La cuadra by Gilmer Mesa
La cuadra depicts life in a violent, impoverished neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia during the rise of the narcotraficantes – where young people turn to crime amid systemic corruption and neglect. It explores how social forces shape individuals’ desperate choices.
“In reality, none of that truly happens, because the State cheats us, the media deceives us, the leaders manipulate us, society despises us, the justice system condemns us, the Church reproves us, and life kills us. So we begin to believe in superstitions and the seductions of characters as dark as they are alluring, who know how to sugarcoat the pill so that the naïve see in their actions the quick fix to all their problems. This, in some way, explains why this neighborhood, like so many others in similar circumstances, has been the ideal breeding ground for the cartel’s plans, and why most of the young teenagers – and some adults – have chosen crime as a way of life – or rather, given the brevity of their careers, as a way of death.”
Kilo by Toby Muse
Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels – from the Jungles to the Streets is a deep investigation into Colombia’s cocaine industry, told through the lives of growers, smugglers, dealers, and soldiers. Muse offers an on-the-ground view of a black-market economy shaped by violence, poverty, and global demand.
“Meet Jose. Jose doesn’t see himself as a criminal. He’s just a farmer growing a crop he won’t lose money on: coca.
This is Fabian. Fabian calls himself a freedom fighter. But wars cost money. And transporting drugs is the fastest way to raise cash.
Tomas runs a factory. But this factory is hidden deep in the jungle, and the product is cocaine.
And finally, here is Alex. Alex decides where the drug goes next: into Europe or the US. And he wields the power of life and death over everyone around him.”
URBANISM, POVERTY, & DAILY SURVIVAL
Child of the Dark by Carolina Maria de Jesus
Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus reveals the harsh realities of life in a São Paulo favela during the 1950s through the eyes of a single mother. It documents poverty, hunger, and social marginalization.
“I classify São Paulo this way: The Governor’s Palace is the living room. The mayor’s office is the dining room and the city is the garden. And the favela is the backyard where they throw the garbage. Sometimes families move into the favela with children. In the beginning they are educated, friendly. Days later they use foul language, are mean and quarrelsome. They are diamonds turned to lead. They are transformed from objects that were in the living room to objects banished to the garbage dump… For me, the world instead of evolving is turning primitive. Those who don’t know hunger will say: ‘Whoever wrote this is crazy.’ It’s necessary to know hunger to know how to describe it.”
MEMOIRS & REFLECTIONS
When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago
When I Was Puerto Rican follows Santiago’s childhood in Puerto Rico and her family’s move to New York City. It captures the challenges of cultural adaptation and identity formation.
“For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created…
Pollito, chicken
Gallina, hen
Lápiz, pencil
y Pluma, pen.
Ventana, window
Puerta, door
Maestra, teacher
y Piso, floor.”
Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy recounts Eire’s childhood in pre-revolutionary Cuba and his exile to the U.S. as part of Operation Peter Pan. It explores themes of loss, displacement, and identity.
“The world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me. That’s how it would always be, from that day forward… You see, Spanish culture is built upon one warning: beware, all is illusion.”
Horizontal Vertigo by Juan Villoro
Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico offers essays and memoirs that capture Mexico City’s contradictions and complexities. The book portrays the city’s dynamic urban life shaped by history and modern change.
“The city that was spreading like an ocean wave has now taken on another defining metaphor: the jungle. As the new undergrowth emerges, the territory is becoming a kind of swamp, a stagnant tidal pool dotted with buildings on stilts that grow higher and higher. My story takes place in density: I write surrounded by millions of people who have another opinion about the same subject. Bewilderment is something we experience in different ways, and no definitive version can be sanctioned. To write about Mexico City is a challenge as elusive as describing vertigo.”
Taco USA by Gustavo Arellano
Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America traces how Mexican food became popularized and transformed in the U.S., often by non-Mexicans adapting it to American tastes. It highlights the cultural and social dynamics behind this culinary evolution.
“Chili con carne, now plain ol’ chili, was a harbinger of things to come for Mexican food. It was a Mexican dish, made by Mexicans for Mexicans, but it was whites who made the dish a national sensation, who pushed it far beyond its ancestral lands, who adapted it to their tastes, who created companies for large-scale production, and who ultimately became its largest consumer to the point that the only thing Mexican about it was the mongrelized Spanish in its name. The Mexicans, meanwhile, shrugged their shoulders and continued cooking and eating their own foods, all the while ostracized by Anglos who nevertheless tore through whatever Mexicans put in front of them.”
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