Our Migrant Souls by Hector Tobar

This is a complicated story of Latin immigration to the United States--mostly to places that less than 200 years ago were part of Mexico--and being shunned and denigrated in places that historically speaking, the shunners are historically immigrants and those that are shunned are more native to the land. That is the crux of the matter, something that American Indians have understood and experienced for 500 years. Adding in to the conversation, the author uses his own family and their immigrant experience to bring some of his theses alive. Many of the conversations about Hispanics in America, especially those told in the media, suffer from a combination of myopia and monotony. They focus on predictable topics—perilous immigration experiences, cartels, poverty—and fail to grapple with the variety of Latino experience. This is not that book. Instead the author attempts in a way to remedy this. Part memoir and part polemic, the book tries to answer a rather panoramic question: What is the Latino experience in America like? At his best, Tobar offers a lyrical portrayal that captures the lives of many Hispanics. This is concise, approachable, and well worth reading.