100 books like Graciela Iturbide's Mexico

Gertrude (Trudi) Blom (1901-1993) was a Swiss journalist, photographer, and environmental activist who went to the rain forest of Chiapas, the Mexican state bordering Guatemala, to work with the Lacandon people, a community of indigenous Mayas. 

Blom was there for almost forty years, between 1941 and 1979, documenting the lives and culture of the Lacandons. Her photographs show an intense love for a vanishing culture and landscape—the lush natural environment of the Lacandons as well as their activities: agriculture, hunting, religious customs, and family structures.

Blom’s late photos document the increasing pressure on their ecosystem, and thus their way of life. These photographs inspired me to learn more about the rich cultures of Mexico’s indigenous people, and to do what we can to protect their fragile environments.

The Mexican Revolution was photographed by many photographers, foreigners as well as Mexicans, whose photographs were collected by news agencies and distributed immediately in newspapers, sometimes even as the fighting was going on. Their photos record defining moments in Mexico’s history, and offer portraits of its participants: soldiers and camp followers (women and children), as well as iconic leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, among others. 

I love this book because it is written by a woman who lived her whole life in Mexico, experienced events of the Revolution, and knew many of its participants. Her personal account is accompanied by 184 photos that enhance her text and make events and people come alive.

The importance of this Revolution cannot be exaggerated. It engulfed much of Mexico for at least two decades (1910-1930), and claimed between 2 and 3.5 million lives. Troops advanced on horseback and trains, in dusty fields… show more.

Having read The Winds that Swept Mexico and seen the amazing photographs in that book, you’ll want to know more about the photographers who risked their lives to accompany Mexican troops in battle and in haphazard camps waiting for something to happen.

This book includes many photographs, but focusses on the history of the Revolution as shown in those photographs, and the processes of photography itself:  how photographers worked in the early twentieth century in the midst of war, and how their photographs were collected and published as the Revolution raged on.

John Mraz is an excellent “visual historian.” I admire the way he explains how photographers got their “shots” of mounted revolutionaries and battles and camp followers—the sweethearts and wives and children who followed the troops, cooked for them, and sometimes tended to their wounds.

Mraz also explains how their photographs became instant propaganda for particular leaders and causes—and… show more.

Photographs pretend to replicate the real, as do literary fictions, and yet both media also create their own “realities”.

This book explores how photographs, placed in fictional narratives, can distort and deceive characters (and the reader) or, to the contrary, illustrate and illuminate the story. Photographs in the hands of writers can create alternative “realities” within the fictional world or reveal the truth! 

A primary example of the use of photography in fiction is the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar’s famous story “Blow up,” which was made into a movie—now a classic—directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. In Dan Russek’s book, we see a number of such “mixed media” fictions.

I love Latin American photography, and I love seeing how Latin American novelists engage this powerful medium for their own literary purposes.

I like biographies that approach a subject from a different angle and this book does that by focusing on the animals that influenced Frida Kahlo. By witnessing Frida’s relationships with her pets—a parrot, eagle, fawn, cat, dogs, turkeys, monkeys—kids will get to know Frida and learn how she became one of the world’s most beloved artists despite several challenges. The back matter explains that the artist often included her pets in her work. So when readers of this biography encounter one of Kahlo’s animalito paintings (perhaps in a museum or in another book), they will delight in recognizing Frida’s furry and feathered friends. A wonderful way to introduce kids to an artist’s work!

Another deeply insightful book from Paul Theroux, On the Plain of Snakes explores the cultural richness and sometimes dangerous aspects of Mexico. With a forward style and charisma, he comes face to face with narcos, police, corruption, migrants, and the sometimes frightening indigenous culture. His writings are not just all darkness and gloom. He goes to great lengths to describe the importance of family in a country with virtually no social network. He talks with the educated, the poverty-stricken, and even meets the leader of the Zapatistas.  After reading On the Plain of Snakes' you will develop a new appreciation for our Mexican neighbors, particularly concerning migration and the border control issues that have dominated the US for too many years. This is a long arduous trip which Theroux makes thoroughly enjoyable. 

For many outside Mexico, the country is synonymous with the war on drugs. There is, of course, much more to Mexico than the view ossified in popular TV dramas like Netflix’s Narcos; however, organised crime has wrought horrifying levels of violence, and shaped the country in many ways. Making sense of all this is Benjamin T Smith’s book on the history of the drug trade. Combining the writing style of James Ellroy with in-depth research that puts most historians to shame, the book is, without doubt, the best English-language work ever produced on the topic.

In this masterpiece of historical narrative, Paul Sullivan investigates the 1875 sacking of a sugar plantation (called Xuxub) and the murder of its American manager by Maya rebels. Located on the geographical frontier between “Ladino” and Maya society, Xuxub became a microcosm of all of the conflicts that haunted Mexico as it entered its “Guilded Age”: inter-elite rivalries, international competition in the wake of the U.S.-Mexico War, and the overwhelming fear that the nation’s Indigenous population would rise up against encroaching liberal capitalism. It all comes together in a murder mystery, written more like true crime than an academic text, right down to the final poetic twist. This is an immensely enjoyable read, so much so that I have read it no fewer than fifteen times. 

It is often said that history is stranger than fiction and a disastrous French invasion of Mexico in 1862 to establish a European-style monarchy certainly fits the cliché. The then-French emperor, Napoleon III, rescued the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand Maximilian from a life as a dilettante in the shadow of his older brother, Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria. Maximilian was offered a throne propped up by French bayonets across the Atlantic. The only problem was that most Mexicans supported the legitimate president, Benito Juárez. After a vicious civil war and a desperate last stand, Maximilian was captured tried and executed in 1867. 

Months earlier, his wife, Charlotte, had broken down and lost her mind pleading for Catholic support in the Vatican before the Pope. Put simply, you couldn’t make it up and, for the most part, Fernando del Paso’s brilliantly researched and readable novel doesn’t. Having written my own non-fiction account… show more.

A story in which the author celebrates her place of origin, her family, and her culture. It's about magic, and how it can take different forms, like when people's hands touch the earth or when houses turn into homes.

I love that the book feels so personal. The illustrations are beautiful.