Writing Latinos

PUBLIC BOOKS

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"Writing Latinos" is a podcast brought to you by PUBLIC BOOKS, featuring interviews with Latino authors of all sorts—scholars, novelists, memoirists, journalists—discussing their books, and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

06/25/2025

Albert Camarillo: Compton in My Soul

Albert Camarillo is the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He’s one of a small number of people who founded the academic field of Chicano/Latino history. He has also mentored so many of the historians who’ve written books that teach us much of what we know about the history of Latinos in the United States. Not least, he is the author of a new book himself, titled Compton In My Soul: A Life In Pursuit of Racial Equality, published by Stanford University Press, in which he recalls growing up in the Black and Brown suburb of Los Angeles, his experience as one of a very small number of Chicano students at UCLA, and his almost fifty years of teaching Chicano history at Stanford. In this episode of Writing Latinos—the season three finale!—we talk with him about the Trump administration’s attack on higher education, the recent trend in Latino history to focus on Black-Brown tension and the anti-blackness of Latinos, the writing of family history, and how our understanding of Latinos has changed since the beginning of his career.

45 min
05/28/2025

Jorell Meléndez Badillo, Puerto Rico: a National History

In a new episode of Writing Latinos, we talk with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo about his most recent book, Puerto Rico: A National History—out next month in paperback from Princeton University Press. Meléndez-Badillo offers a sweeping history of the island since Spanish colonization. Most provocatively, he chronicles a long tradition of thinking about Puerto Rico as an independent nation, even though it has been a territorial possession for the better part of five hundred years. In addition to the book, we talk with him about his collaboration with Bad Bunny on the historical narrative accompanying San Benito’s new album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which had him frantically writing dozens of history lessons, scrawled by hand, at the end of last year. Not exactly an everyday occurrence for a history professor! Puerto Rico: A National History is Meléndez-Badillo’s third book, following The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (2021), and Voces libertarias: Los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico (2015).

45 min
05/14/2025

Justin Torres Reads “Youth: The Palisades as a Backdrop”

In this special episode of Writing Latinos, with the writer Justin Torres, we tried something new. Torres reads a short vignette —“Youth: The Palisades as a Backdrop,” by the Afro-Puerto Rican writer, Jesús Colón—and then we discuss it together. We had so much to talk about! Historical references. Readings of imagery. His message about gender, class, and race. “Youth” in the context of Colón’s other writings. The vignette as a powerfully evocative genre that Torres uses in his own writing. And what a treat to do this with Torres, a professor at UCLA and the author of two stunning novels: We the Animals, which was made into a feature film, and Blackouts, the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

48 min
04/16/2025

Nicolas Medina Mora: América del Norte

Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar is the descendant of an elite Mexican family who studies at Yale and then enrolls in an MFA program at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s working on a failed history of Mexico—meaning his own failure to write his book, and the Mexican nation’s failures, especially in relation to the United States. Along the way, “Sebas” crosses many borders—between the United States and Mexico, of course, but also between elite and non-elite Mexicans and Latinos in the United States. This is the basic plot of Nicolás Medina Mora’s debut novel, América del Norte, which offers a beautifully written meditation on historical, cultural, and political relationships between the United States and Mexico. Sebas, like Medina, sees the subject of Latinidad from the perspective of a member of the Mexican elite who is more like other elites in the United States than like working class Mexicans and Mexican Americans on either side of the border. On this newest episode of Writing Latinos, we talk about all of it, including how Medina wrestles with “Latino” as a concept in a way that makes for great listening

37 min
04/02/2025

Marie Arana: Latinoland

Marie Arana has had a fascinating career as an editor and writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the novels Cellophane and Lima Nights; a memoir called American Chica; a history of Latin America titled Silver, Sword, and Stone; and a stunning biography of Simón Bolívar, the so-called Liberator of Latin America. Arana was the editor of the Washington Post’s Book World and the inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress. We talk with her in this new episode of Writing Latinos about her newest book, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority. We discuss how, as a Peruvian American raised in places as different as Wyoming and New Jersey, her somewhat unique Latino experience (but aren’t they all?) shaped the questions she wanted to answer in LatinoLand. She explores such a wide variety of subjects—religion, politics, business, identity and more—and in a way that’s unorthodox compared with how other Latino authors have written about them. Come and listen to us talk about her life and writing and her thoughts about the inevitability of Latino unity. As always, thanks for listening to Writing Latinos!

39 min
03/19/2025

Lori Flores: Awaiting Their Feast

You probably remember the picture of himself, both thumbs up, that Donald Trump posted on social media with the caption, “Best Taco Bowl.” It was his ode to Mexican food on Cinco de Mayo 2016. The picture mocked relentlessly, and deservedly so. For Latinos, taco bowls aren’t really a thing. And even if they were, it’s doubtful that Trump Tower would serve the best of them. For Latinos, Cinco de Mayo is less of a thing than it is for other groups. But most importantly, Trump was celebrating Mexican food at the same time that, on the campaign trail, he was denigrating Mexican immigrants. Lori A. Flores’s new book, Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19, effectively explores this tension between many Americans’ love for Mexican food and their simultaneous distaste for Mexican people. Fortunately, Flores doesn’t make us relive the cringe of Trump’s post—as I’ve done here. Instead, she introduces us to the Latina and Latino food workers; Latina and Latino–owned restaurants; and American consumer’s taste for Latin American and Latino cuisine in New England, especially New York. I’m so glad to kick off Season 3 of Writing Latinos by talking with Flores about her new book. We discuss the popularity of tamales in New York during the 19th century, Latino workers’ demands for healthy food and food from their culture, the Mexican proprietor of a high-end Mexican restaurant, the laborers who assemble our Christmas wreaths, and the workers who harvest the mighty sea cucumber. All these subjects are original contributions to the field of Latino history, but they’re also just super interesting, as you’ll see when you listen. Flores is a professor of history at SUNY–Stony Brook. Awaiting Their Feast, published by the University of North Carolina Press, as part of their Latinx Histories series, is her second book. Enjoy!

41 min
07/24/2024

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: Catalina

For the final episode of Season 2 of Writing Latinos, we talked with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about her new novel, Catalina, published by One World. It is an engrossing read about a young woman named Catalina, who lived in Ecuador as a small girl, migrated to New York to live with her grandparents, attended Harvard University, and, by the novel’s end, finds herself flirting with a career in writing and publishing. We talked about the sorts of lessons we learn about Latin American history from our families and our professors, Catalina’s encounter with different kinds of Latinos at Harvard, as well as her desire for fame and stardom, and the differences between writing fiction and creative non-fiction, which was the genre of Cornejo Villavicencio’s first book, The Undocumented Americans, a finalist for a National Book Award. Thank you for listening to Season 2 and stay tuned for an announcement about Season 3.

38 min
07/10/2024

Jamie Figueroa: Mother Island

In this episode of Writing Latinos, we talk with the widely published, award-winning author, Jamie Figueroa, about her new memoir, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico, published by Pantheon. As a child growing up in Ohio, Figueroa experienced an othering that made her feel like she needed to recover centuries of family history shaped by colonialism and diaspora. It was a journey that took her to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she teaches creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and to Puerto Rico, where her mother was born. Along the way, she recognizes the similarities and differences that brought her closer to and pushed her away from her mom, especially when it came to universal themes like love, longing, family, and acculturation. Figueroa’s second book, Mother Island is both beautiful and moving, and ultimately it is a book that we can all relate to.

41 min

5

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"Writing Latinos" is a podcast brought to you by PUBLIC BOOKS, featuring interviews with Latino authors of all sorts—scholars, novelists, memoirists, journalists—discussing their books, and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

Creator

PUBLIC BOOKS
Years Active

2023 - 2025
Episodes

23
Rating

Clean
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© 2023
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Writing Latinos