Essential Nonfiction Books on Latin America

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson A Denis

War Against All Puerto Ricans tells how the United States invaded Puerto Rico, put it under colonial control, and brutally suppressed uprisings against its own citizens.

“For decades the doctors sterilized Puerto Rican women without their knowledge or consent. Over 20,000 women were sterilized in this one town. This scenario was repeated until one-third of the women on the island had been sterilized and Puerto Rico had the highest incidence of female sterilization in the world. This campaign stemmed from a growing concern in the United States about ‘inferior races’ and the declining ‘purity’ of Anglo-Saxon bloodlines.”

War Against Puerto Ricans is included on my Ultimate List of History Books.

Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano

Open Veins of Latin America exposes centuries of economic exploitation of Latin America, critiquing 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.”

Read my notes on Open Veins of Latin America here!

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 plea to the Crown, documenting the brutal treatment and mass killings of Indigenous peoples by Spanish colonizers.

“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.”

Read more about A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies here!

Puerto Rico by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Puerto Rico is a national history – from Indigenous civilizations and Spanish colonization to U.S. annexation, economic dependency, and modern political struggles.

“While there was much debate about possible next steps, Washington reached a consensus that Puerto Ricans were not fit to rule themselves. They needed to be civilized, enlightened, and educated.”

Haiti by Laurent Dubois

Haiti traces the country’s revolutionary origins to the enduring struggles with foreign intervention that continue to shape the nation today.

“By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendants of the Haitian Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.”

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here investigates how U.S. policies and regional violence have driven Central American migration to the U.S.

“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.”

Read my notes on Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here here!

The Beast by Óscar Martínez

The Beast follows Central American migrants as they ride ‘La Bestia,’ the deadly freight trains headed toward the U.S. border.

“Along the way they will be preyed upon – by cartels, police, Mexican immigration authorities, 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. Migrants are kidnapped en masse by Zetas, with the complicity of corrupted local police and 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. As many as seventy thousand lie buried along the death corridor of the migrants’ trail.”

Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli

Tell Me How It Ends blends essay and testimony as Luiselli reflects on her work translating for unaccompanied child migrants navigating the U.S. immigration system.

“Children do what their stomachs tell them to do. They don’t think twice when they have to chase a moving train. They run along it, reach for any metal bar at hand, and fling themselves toward whichever half-stable surface they may land on. Children chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps, that allows them to endure almost anything just to make it to the other side of horror, whatever may be waiting there for them.”

The Line Becomes A River by Francisco Cantú

The Line Becomes a River describes Cantú’s experience as a U.S. Border Patrol agent and his eventual moral reckoning with the system he served.

“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.

“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 shares Vargas’s experience as an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines to the U.S., advocating to recognize 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. 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.”

La cuadra by Gilmer Mesa

La cuadra depicts life in a violent, impoverished neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia during the rise of narcotraffickers, exploring 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.”

A Massacre in Mexico by Anabel Hernández

A Massacre in Mexico is an account of the 2014 disappearance of forty-three students, exposing a web of corruption that reaches into the highest levels of the state.

“In this official version, the Mexican government said that the army and the Federal Police didn’t know anything about what was happening. They got notice two or three hours after everything ends. What I have seen all these years – four years of the investigation – is that this official version is a lie.”

Kilo by Toby Muse

Kilo is a deep investigation into Colombia’s cocaine industry, told through the lives of growers, smugglers, dealers, and soldiers.

“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.”

Massacre in Mexico by Elena Poniatowska

Massacre in Mexico puts together a portrait of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a record of state violence that continues to reverberate through Mexico’s political and cultural life.

“Gilberto said it at the Campo: We are always armed with our ideals. On October 2nd, we had no other weapons. Only hopes and ideas which, for the government, are more dangerous than bullets. A single bullet kills one person. A revolutionary idea awakens hundreds or even thousands.”

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 as a single mother in a São Paulo favela during the 1950s.

“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… 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.”

The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara

The Motorcycle Diaries recount Che Guevara’s journey across South America, exploring the continent’s landscapes, cultures, and social injustices that later shaped his revolutionary ideals.

“I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people.”

El olvido que seremos by Héctor Abad Faciolince

El olvido que seremos (Forgotten We Will Be) recounts the life and murder of Colombian doctor and human-rights advocate Héctor Abad Gómez through his son’s remembrance.

“My grandfather sometimes commented about me: ‘This child needs a firm hand.’ But my father would answer: ‘If he needs it, life will provide it – life itself is harsh enough, and I won’t help.’”

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.

“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 recounts Eire’s childhood in pre-revolutionary Cuba and his exile to the U.S. as part of Operation Peter Pan.

“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.”

The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz

The Labyrinth of Solitude is Paz’s exploration of Mexican identity – its masks, rituals, ruptures, and myths.

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”

Instrucciones para vivir en México by Jorge Ibargüengoitia

Instrucciones para vivir en México is a humorful guide to the absurdities, contradictions, and everyday improvisations that shape life in Mexico.

“Those who are forced to get up early make up a social group of the discontented, where revolutions would surely be born if its members didn’t have the tendency to fall asleep for any reason and in any position.”

Horizontal Vertigo by Juan Villoro

Horizontal Vertigo offers essays and memoirs that capture Mexico City’s contradictions and complexities, 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. 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 traces how Mexican food became popularized and transformed in the U.S., highlighting the 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.”