Here are 100 books that Abuelo, the Sea, and Me fans have personally recommended if you like
Abuelo, the Sea, and Me.
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I’m a Panamanian American author and mother of two bilingual and bicultural children. I live a life between two beautiful languages and cultures, but that intersection is not always easy. In Squawk of Spanish, I explore the issue some children face when they don’t feel comfortable speaking the language of their grandparents. On this list, I’ve included a sample of books that celebrate some of the day-to-day joys and challenges of growing up Latine in the US. I hope you enjoy it!
For lovers of dragons and action-packed adventures, this book is a great starting point for discussing machismo culture and family expectations.
I love that Miguel is an artist who fights for his family by forging his own path and resisting the legacy of the sword by using his mighty imagination. Sprinkled with Spanish and chock-full of cultural details, I found this book to be a celebration of boyhood and creativity—and so fun to read aloud!
A charming Spanish language story about a young artist in a family of sword fighters, whose passions are put to the test when a dragon attacks his village.
Miguel was like a paintbrush in a family of steely swords ...
All his life, Miguel's familia told him he must fight! But his family's art of sword fighting never captivated him as much as the sway of his colored pencils did.
When his village is threatened by El Dragon, Miguel must make a choice: will he stand with his familia and fight, or can he prove that the pencil is mightier…
I’m a Panamanian American author and mother of two bilingual and bicultural children. I live a life between two beautiful languages and cultures, but that intersection is not always easy. In Squawk of Spanish, I explore the issue some children face when they don’t feel comfortable speaking the language of their grandparents. On this list, I’ve included a sample of books that celebrate some of the day-to-day joys and challenges of growing up Latine in the US. I hope you enjoy it!
A vivid account of community activism. I learned so much from this book, which is based on the real history of Chicano Park. The story is told from a child’s point of view and celebrates community engagement and the collective strength of Chicanos in the face of neglect and environmental racism. A book that stayed with me way past the last page.
A vivid historical fiction account of the community activism behind San Diego's Chicano Park-home to the largest outdoor mural collection in the U.S.-and just one example of the Mexican American community's rich history of resistance and resilience.
Barrio Logan, one of San Diego's oldest Chicane neighborhoods, once brimmed with families and stretched all the way to the glorious San Diego Bay. But in the decades after WWII, the community lost their beach and bayfront to factories, junkyards, and an interstate that divided the neighborhood and forced around 5,000 people out of their homes. Then on April 22, 1970, residents discovered…
I’m a Panamanian American author and mother of two bilingual and bicultural children. I live a life between two beautiful languages and cultures, but that intersection is not always easy. In Squawk of Spanish, I explore the issue some children face when they don’t feel comfortable speaking the language of their grandparents. On this list, I’ve included a sample of books that celebrate some of the day-to-day joys and challenges of growing up Latine in the US. I hope you enjoy it!
Mariana visits her extended family in Mexico for the first time and feels overwhelmed with new sounds, faces, smells, and words that are supposed to mean family.
I think this book depicts the experience of second and third generation kids perfectly, especially as they visit their parents’ childhood home. I love the message it sends that family and love transcends language and cultural divide.
A heartwarming picture book about a young girl on her first trip to visit family in Mexico, who learns there is no language barrier when it comes to love-from debut author Monica Mancillas and rising star illustrator Erika Meza. Perfect for fans of Where Are You From? and Mango, Abuela, and Me.
Mariana is visiting her abuelita and extended family in Mexico for the first time. Her tummy does a flip as she and Mami cross the frontera.
There are all new sights, smells, and sounds. And at Abuelita's house, Mariana is overwhelmed by new faces and Spanish phrases she…
Everyone in Angelina's big family has a story to tell.
The Yesterday Dress is a story for seven to nine-year olds about family connections and how learning about the past gives us a stronger sense of where we come from, who we are and how we fit into our world.…
I’m a Panamanian American author and mother of two bilingual and bicultural children. I live a life between two beautiful languages and cultures, but that intersection is not always easy. In Squawk of Spanish, I explore the issue some children face when they don’t feel comfortable speaking the language of their grandparents. On this list, I’ve included a sample of books that celebrate some of the day-to-day joys and challenges of growing up Latine in the US. I hope you enjoy it!
A beautiful book about preserving traditions. This book follows a girl who anticipates a beloved holiday but worries about not being able to celebrate it in her new home. Where will she find grass for the camels in the midst of the Midwest snow?
This book helped our family discuss the different traditions we celebrate and answer some of my children’s questions: Can the three kings visit us in the US? And will Santa find his way to us if we move? I appreciate how the book introduces Three Kings Day and serves as a reminder that we carry our heritage and traditions wherever life takes us.
In this story about Dia de los Reyes, or Three Kings' Day, a girl and her family discover new ways to celebrate their Puerto Rican heritage in Ohio.
It's eleven days after Christmas and Lucia yearns to be in lush Puerto Rico celebrating Dia de los Reyes with family and friends. But this year, instead of dancing and singing in the parrandas of her Puerto Rican neighborhood, she is surrounded by cold and silence in snow-blanketed Ohio. How will she ever be able to guide the Three Kings to her new home in the frosty Midwest? This picture book is…
In 1968, my white Jewish American mother married my Indian American Hindu father. I grew up in Connecticut and often felt othered in my mostly white Christian community. I also felt different than many of my extended family members, feeling not quite Jewish or Indian “enough.” These issues and questions I had and still have about my identity have fueled my writing ever since. I write about characters navigating multiple identities asking questions about racism, prejudice, and xenophobia often for the first time. The books on this list are books I wished I could have had around to keep me company during my youth.
Ruth Behar writes for both adults and children and is a multi-award-winning writer and a Cuban-American Anthropologist. She’s also Jewish with Ashkenazi and Sephardic roots. Based on the author’s real experiences, we follow ten-year-old Ruthie and her family who are recent Jewish-Cuban immigrants trying to make a new home in 1960s Queens, NY after Castro comes to power. Just as Ruthie is adjusting to school and making new friends, a devastating car accident puts her in a body cast for a year. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking, and inspiring story. I particularly loved her friendship with recent Indian immigrant, Ramu, who has to endure a terrible family tragedy as well. There are some heavy themes here, but Ruthie’s innocent, bright, and brave voice brings the reader along in a hopeful way. There’s some great food (like guava pastries, flan, and samosas) mentioned here, too.
"A book for anyone mending from childhood wounds."-Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
In this unforgettable multicultural coming-of-age narrative-based on the author's childhood in the 1960s-a young Cuban-Jewish immigrant girl is adjusting to her new life in New York City when her American dream is suddenly derailed. Ruthie's plight will intrigue readers, and her powerful story of strength and resilience, full of color, light, and poignancy, will stay with them for a long time.
Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro's Cuba to New York City. Just when…
I'm an Italian-born writer living in Minneapolis. I experienced being an outsider early on in my childhood when my family moved from Naples to Este, a small town in the hills near Venice. My fascination with language started then as I had to master the different Northern dialect. I was a listener rather than a talker. My shyness was painful in life but turned out to be a gift as a writer. When I left Italy for America, once again I was an outsider, too visible or invisible, and facing a new language. I relate to estrangement and longing, but I treasure that being an outsider still gives me a sense of wonder about reality.
“Do you understand the sadness of geography?” is the epigraph by Michael Ondaatje to this short story collection, I would ask the same.
Memory and desire are central emotions in the lives of South Indian immigrants who move. The sense of dislocation belongs equally to the ones who go and the ones who stay and is woven beautifully in these stories.
In one, brochures about marvels in a retired home in Tamil Nadu are flaunted by a daughter who lives in Atlanta and cannot take care of her mother in India. The mother had encouraged the daughter to seek fortune in America but longs for the old life when the children did not move away.
The contradictions are powerfully rendered in all the stories and they speak to me.
*Winner of the 2022 New American Voices Award* *Winner of the 2023 Oregon Book Award for Fiction*
Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Finalist for the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction Longlisted for the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence Longlisted for The Story Prize
These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women’s lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner
Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about…
Discover a new early middle-grade graphic novel series full of humor and heart about a lovable dog, her favorite human, and their pawsome pack in this unforgettable friendship story. Though Thunder wants to be good for Sage, she’s having a rough time stopping herself from doing things she knows are…
I’ve been fascinated with the topic of immigration since childhood. My father is an immigrant, and my mother grew up overseas. My first job after college was working for a youth program for immigrant and refugee kids in Chicago. Now, I am a professor who teaches and writes about migration law. I find stories about how moving across borders shapes people’s lives to be endlessly interesting, bringing up themes of belonging, home, memory, trauma, and identity. I also think that the topic of global migration is intimately linked to questions of justice and equality and requires us all to reckon with the ways in which the colonial past shapes the present.
I loved this book because, while it is full of personal stories, it also looks at the big picture and asks why global migration is happening in the ways that it is.
The author centers colonialism in his explanation of why people are coming from the Global South to the North and why it is short-sighted to fear and loathe such newcomers. Mehta is a really excellent writer–I loved the way he weaved the forest and the trees together to help explain the politics of migration from the global to the local level.
An impassioned defence of global immigration from the acclaimed author of Maximum City.
Drawing on his family's own experience emigrating from India to Britain and America, and years of reporting around the world, Suketu Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. The West, he argues, is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. He juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of labourers, nannies and others, from Dubai to New York, and explains why more people are on the move today than ever before. As civil strife and climate change…
Eileen Charbonneau’s love affair with New York City was cemented the day she was downtown on jury duty and witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. New York is the Melting Pot birthplace of her parents, home of her first job (Brooklyn) first Shakespeare (Central Park) and Folk music (Greenwich Village) performances, first apartments (West Village and Washington Heights), and first cocktail (Kir Royale at the Algonquin). Many family stories and deep roots remain.
This one is set in the early 20th century. Coralie, works at her father’s Coney Island freak show as a mermaid and has extraordinary swimming abilities but is as sheltered as a goldfish in a bowl. She meets and falls in love with a photographer who is on hand to document the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. This is for readers who like their historical fiction touched with that kitchen-sink magical realism that Alice Hoffman is celebrated for. Turn-of-the-century New York sparkles throughout. This one is closer to my own Melting Pot roots and its eccentric characters seem so New York!
Coney Island, 1911: Coralie Sardie is the daughter of a self-proclaimed scientist and professor who acts as the impresario of The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a boardwalk freak show offering amazement and entertainment to the masses. An extraordinary swimmer, Coralie appears as the Mermaid alongside performers like the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl,and a 100 year old turtle, in her father's ""museum"". She swims regularly in New York's Hudson River, and one night stumbles upon a striking young man alone in the woods photographing moon-lit trees. From that moment, Coralie knows her life will never be the same.
I first became aware of harms of immigration enforcement policies while volunteering to tutor kids of undocumented migrant farmworkers in the 1990s. Through a variety of jobs in the U.S. and Latin America, my eyes were opened to reasons driving people to migrate and challenges immigrants face. I eventually went to graduate school in Geography to study local to transnational reverberations of immigration policies. A project in Ecuador where I helped families of people detained in the U.S. led me to realize how huge, cruel, and ineffective U.S. immigration detention is. I hope these books help you break through myths about detention and make sense of the chaos.
Unfortunately, the word “gulag” is all too apt for describing U.S. carceral systems.
While this book came out nearly twenty years ago, I picked it because its gut-wrenching descriptions of what goes on inside U.S. immigration facilities still reflect contemporary reality.
Journalist Mark Dow draws on interviews with detainees, guards, and immigration officials to document the atrocious material conditions, violations of human rights, and abuses routinely experienced by detainees.
He details how guards are conditioned to treat all detainees as criminals, regardless of who they are, and how using private companies helps shield facilities from scrutiny and accountability. Given the horrors revealed in this book, it is especially alarming that the detention system has more than doubled since its publication.
Before September 11, 2001, few Americans had heard of immigration detention, but in fact a secret and repressive prison system run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has existed in this country for more than two decades. In "American Gulag", prisoners, jailers, and whistle-blowing federal officials come forward to describe the frightening reality inside these INS facilities. Journalist Mark Dow's on-the-ground reporting brings to light documented cases of illegal beatings and psychological torment, prolonged detention, racism, and inhumane conditions. Intelligent, impassioned, and unlike anything that has been written on the topic, this gripping work of investigative journalism should be…
The Thing to Remember about Stargazing
by
Matt Forrest Esenwine,
What is the most important thing to remember about stargazing? When to do it, who to do it with, what to look for? It’s none of those! This picture book’s spare, lyrical text offers many suggestions for enjoying stargazing – but there’s really only ONE thing you need to remember,…
I am Christina Vo, an author deeply passionate about exploring themes of healing and intergenerational trauma, particularly within the Vietnamese community. My personal journey and family history have profoundly influenced my understanding of these topics, as my own experiences have driven me to seek out stories that resonate with resilience and recovery. Writing and reading about these themes have been a way to process my past and connect with others who share similar experiences. Through my books and this curated list, I aim to highlight the voices and stories that inspire healing and foster a deeper understanding of our collective history.
This lyrical and poignant memoir chronicles Kim Thúy's journey from Vietnam to Quebec as a refugee. The book's fragmented narrative mirrors the process of piecing together memories and identities.
I was particularly moved by the author's ability to convey profound emotions with simplicity and elegance, making it a touching exploration of intergenerational trauma and the healing power of storytelling.
Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thuy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and…
