Books like The Latino Threat: 100 fan favorites

By Leo Chavez,

Here are 100 books that The Latino Threat fans have personally recommended if you like The Latino Threat. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900

Melita M. Garza Author Of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression

From my list on how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™m a journalism historian who sees an old newspaper the way Alice saw the looking glass, as a portal to a place where things wind up beyond the imaginable. In comparing English- and Spanish-language journalism, I examine how people from the same time and place live distinct constructed realities, separated by their news source looking glass. I aim to recenter the journalism of marginalized groups in the American experience and in media history. After more than 20 years at major U.S. news organizations and 10 years in academia, often as the first or only Mexican Americanā€”Iā€™ve honed the ability to see from both sides of the glass.

Melita's book list on how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans

Melita M. Garza Why did Melita love this book?

In 1881, a reporter described Texas as a ā€œvast wildernessā€ that was ā€œinfested by roaming Mexicans, rattlesnakes, and braying jackasses.ā€

In other words, it was a land calling for white people to settle, civilize, and supplant the ā€œindolentā€ Mexican. I was jolted by this and other visceral literary snippets, which De Leon drew from nineteenth-century travelogues, letters, and newspaper articles.

The book exposes the power of the printed word in forming and perpetuating early Euro-American stereotypes claiming Mexican Americans in Texas were unpatriotic, mixed blood, lazy, immoral, and cruel. Writing in 1983, De Leon concluded that these attitudes had shifted into subtler modern racism.

Yet the lynching of Mexican Americans persists in the nationā€™s second-largest state, with more than 23 massacred in a white supremacist attack at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

By Arnoldo De Leon,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked They Called Them Greasers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Tension between Anglos and Tejanos has existed in the Lone Star State since the earliest settlements. Such antagonism has produced friction between the two peoples, and whites have expressed their hostility toward Mexican Americans unabashedly and at times violently.

This seminal work in the historical literature of race relations in Texas examines the attitudes of whites toward Mexicans in nineteenth-century Texas. For some, it will be disturbing reading. But its unpleasant revelations are based on extensive and thoughtful research into Texas' past. The result is important reading not merely for historians but for all who are concerned with the historyā€¦


Book cover of Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse

Melita M. Garza Author Of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression

From my list on how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™m a journalism historian who sees an old newspaper the way Alice saw the looking glass, as a portal to a place where things wind up beyond the imaginable. In comparing English- and Spanish-language journalism, I examine how people from the same time and place live distinct constructed realities, separated by their news source looking glass. I aim to recenter the journalism of marginalized groups in the American experience and in media history. After more than 20 years at major U.S. news organizations and 10 years in academia, often as the first or only Mexican Americanā€”Iā€™ve honed the ability to see from both sides of the glass.

Melita's book list on how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans

Melita M. Garza Why did Melita love this book?

The compelling, digestible, and often dangerous metaphor is the star of Brown Tide Rising.

Santa Ana clearly explains that it is the mediated metaphor that embeds itself in our brains, cementing ideas and tropes. Looking at Latino metaphors in historical issues of the Los Angeles Times, he offers a new application for linguist George Lakoffā€™s cognitive model of metaphor, which studies how metaphors map to each other.

For instance, Santa Ana identifies ā€œflowing watersā€ as one such metaphoric tie-in that joins metaphors such as tides, surges, waves. I like this book because it is a great reminder about how the images conjured by wordsā€”in this case metaphorsā€”make us ā€œseeā€ the world in certain ways. 

By Otto Santa Ana,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Brown Tide Rising as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

2002 - Best Book on Ethnic and Racial Political Ideology and/or Political Theory - Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics of the American Political Science Association

"...awash under a brown tide...the relentless flow of immigrants..like waves on a beach, these human flows are remaking the face of America...." Since 1993, metaphorical language such as this has permeated mainstream media reporting on the United States' growing Latino population. In this groundbreaking book, Otto Santa Ana argues that far from being mere figures of speech, such metaphors produce and sustain negative public perceptions of the Latino community and its place inā€¦


Book cover of Shame the Stars

Melita M. Garza Author Of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression

From my list on how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™m a journalism historian who sees an old newspaper the way Alice saw the looking glass, as a portal to a place where things wind up beyond the imaginable. In comparing English- and Spanish-language journalism, I examine how people from the same time and place live distinct constructed realities, separated by their news source looking glass. I aim to recenter the journalism of marginalized groups in the American experience and in media history. After more than 20 years at major U.S. news organizations and 10 years in academia, often as the first or only Mexican Americanā€”Iā€™ve honed the ability to see from both sides of the glass.

Melita's book list on how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans

Melita M. Garza Why did Melita love this book?

Lee & Low, the bookā€™s publisher, describes Shame the Stars as a YA Romeo & Juliet story. This piece of historical fiction is so much more.

It draws on true stories of how Texas Rangers lynched and pillaged Mexican Americans in South Texas. These are stories that my parents heard growing up in San Antonio, Texas, and that were often orally passed on in families, though not so often in the history books of that era.

This novel is on my list because it flips the camera angle on images of Mexican Americans in media, with characters taking to the printing press to assert their rights and tell their stories. One such journalist/protagonist is the father of the character Juliet/DulceƱa, who illuminates the misdeeds of the Rangers in his news accounts.

Without giving too much away, Iā€™ll merely hint that the book draws inspiration from the long overlooked crusading Mexicanā€¦

By Guadalupe Garcia McCall,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Shame the Stars as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Eighteen-year-old Joaquin del Toro's future looks bright. With his older brother in the priesthood, he s set to inherit his family s Texas ranch. He s in love with Dulcena and she s in love with him. But it s 1915, and trouble has been brewing along the US-Mexico border. On one side, the Mexican Revolution is taking hold; on the other, Texas Rangers fight Tejano insurgents, and ordinary citizens are caught in the middle.

As tensions grow, Joaquin is torn away from Dulcena, whose father s critical reporting on the Rangers in the local newspaper has driven a wedgeā€¦


Book cover of Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist

Melita M. Garza Author Of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression

From my list on how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™m a journalism historian who sees an old newspaper the way Alice saw the looking glass, as a portal to a place where things wind up beyond the imaginable. In comparing English- and Spanish-language journalism, I examine how people from the same time and place live distinct constructed realities, separated by their news source looking glass. I aim to recenter the journalism of marginalized groups in the American experience and in media history. After more than 20 years at major U.S. news organizations and 10 years in academia, often as the first or only Mexican Americanā€”Iā€™ve honed the ability to see from both sides of the glass.

Melita's book list on how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans

Melita M. Garza Why did Melita love this book?

During a period when Mexican American women were seen as having only three possible roles in life, either as hypersexualized figures, maids, or beauty queens, this stirring biography uncovers how one Latina, Adela Sloss-Vento, broke the mold.

She had only a high school educationā€”and one belatedly received at that, but Sloss-Vento became a public intellectual and a vital, though hidden figure in the emerging Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Reading this stimulating biography, I found it easy to see Sloss-Vento (1901-1998), sitting at her kitchen table writing spirited columns and letters in defense of Mexican Americans to English and Spanish Texas newspaper editors.

Though Mexican American women didnā€™t begin entering into mainstream journalism jobs in any sizeable numbers until the 1980s, Sloss-Ventoā€™s story shows how at least one Latina beat back the barriers and made her own way into print.

By Cynthia E. Orozco,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Agent of Change as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women, Texas State Historical Association

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901-1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento's achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader.

Bringing to light the economic and political transformations that swept through South Texas in the 1920s as ranching declined and agribusiness proliferated, Cynthia E. Orozco situates Sloss-Vento'sā€¦


Book cover of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

Claudia Smith Brinson Author Of Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina

From my list on revealing what is hidden, lost, forgotten.

Why am I passionate about this?

I lived in sixteen places by the time I was twenty-two. A peripatetic youth may teach you that different is interesting, that stereotypes donā€™t hold, that the emperor has no clothes. When I moved South and worked as a journalist, I found black eldersā€™ stories so different from the official stories of white authorities. Horrified that these men and women would die with their heroism untold, I interviewed more than 150 black activists for Stories of Struggle. I want to know what is missing; I want it found. Like a detective, an anthropologist, a scientist, and yes, a journalist, I want to know, and I want others to know.

Claudia's book list on revealing what is hidden, lost, forgotten

Claudia Smith Brinson Why did Claudia love this book?

The Race Beat quickly turns to open conflict. White-owned media wake up to the atrocities of racism. (It was way past time to pay attention. Exploring that is among the reasons I appreciate the book.) What follows seem like war movies.

We learn just how hard it was to get the story, photograph, or film; get the story out; get yourself out. Journalists for the white-owned Northern press, black-owned press, and TV networks are assaulted by enraged mobs during the Montgomery bus boycott, Central High Schoolā€™s desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas; James Meredithā€™s enrollment at the University of Mississippi; and Freedom Rides into Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama.

They dodge attack dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham and club-wielding ā€posse menā€ in Selma. They persist. They make a daily record. Without them, the movement would have been ā€œa bird without wings,ā€ said John Lewis, Freedom Rider (and later, US senator). 

By Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Race Beat as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American pressā€”and the journalists responsible for themā€”profoundly changed the nationā€™s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ā€˜60s.

Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmenā€”black and whiteā€”revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nationā€™s history, as told by those whoā€¦


Book cover of Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants

Sarah Tosh Author Of The Immigration Law Death Penalty: Aggravated Felonies, Deportation, and Legal Resistance

From my list on challenge the ā€œgood immigrant/bad immigrantā€ binary.

Why am I passionate about this?

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I was acutely aware of the way my non-white and non-citizen classmates were treated differently by police and other authorities. Studying racial inequality in the War on Drugs as an undergraduate and graduate-level Sociology student, I began to understand the many links between the criminal and immigration systems, and how often the stories of criminalized people are left behind. I became committed to bringing attention to the racially inequalities that shape these systems. In doing so, I aim to uplift resistance to the ā€œgood immigrant/bad immigrantā€ binary that frames non-citizens with criminal records as undeserving and disposable.

Sarah's book list on challenge the ā€œgood immigrant/bad immigrantā€ binary

Sarah Tosh Why did Sarah love this book?

Captivity Beyond Prisons blew me away in its explanations of criminalized deportation and the ā€œgood immigrant/bad immigrant binaryā€ that has all too often defined immigration rights advocacy.

While familiar with this binary, I had never seen it so clearly explained before reading this book, particularly in its arguments about how women, imprisoned, and gender-non-conforming immigrants are commonly categorized as undeserving and expendable.

The included stories of Latina women impacted by intertwining systems of immigration and criminal justice enforcement affected me greatly, as did the argument that frameworks of prison abolitionā€”which view all people as deserving of humanity, including those deemed ā€œcriminalsā€ā€”should be further adopted in the fight for immigrant rights.

This book is distinctive in its focus on non-citizen women affected by the criminal justice system, which I have rarely seen elsewhere.

By Martha D. Escobar,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Captivity Beyond Prisons as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Today the United States leads the world in incarceration rates. The country increasingly relies on the prison system as a "fix" for the regulation of societal issues. Captivity Beyond Prisons is the first full-length book to explicitly link prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants.

Starting in the 1990s, the United States saw tremendous expansion in the number of imprisoned (im)migrants, specifically Latinas/os. Consequently, there was also an increase in the number of deportations. In addition to regulating society, prisons also serve as a reproductive control strategy, both in preventing female inmates from having children and by separatingā€¦


Book cover of Reporting War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War II

Richard Fine Author Of The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

From my list on American war reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedyā€™s scoop of the German surrender, Iā€™m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.

Richard's book list on American war reporting

Richard Fine Why did Richard love this book?

Moseley was the Chief European Correspondent for The Chicago Tribune for the last forty years of the twentieth century and although published by a university press is more a work of journalism than original scholarship. 

It is based largely on the memoirs of an extraordinary number of reporters, many American but many more not. The real virtue of this book is how wide-ranging it is, covering the entire war and reporters from all of the combatant countries.

Readers get a vivid sense of how World War II was just thatā€”a war that raged across the globe. 

By Ray Moseley,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Reporting War as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Luminary journalists Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Walter Cronkite, and Clare Hollingworth were among the young reporters who chronicled World War II's daily horrors and triumphs for Western readers. In this fascinating book, Ray Moseley, himself a former foreign correspondent who encountered a number of these journalists in the course of his long career, mines the correspondents' writings to relate, in an exhilarating parallel narrative, the events across every theater-Europe, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, and Japan-as well as the lives of the courageous journalists who doggedly followed the action and the story, often while embedded in the Allied armies.

Moseley's broadā€¦


Book cover of Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall

Jim Elledge Author Of An Angel in Sodom: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the Gay Rights Movement

From my list on gay history before Stonewall.

Why am I passionate about this?

In post-Roe America, gay people face the very real possibility of our rights being stripped from us, underscoring the importance of this adage: ā€œThose who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.ā€ That's why years ago, when I realize that many gay men were ignorant about gay history before Stonewall, I began editing anthologies of gay writings from the past. That led me to writing biographies and histories in which I explore gay menā€™s experiences, hoping my work shines a light on our forgotten past.

Jim's book list on gay history before Stonewall

Jim Elledge Why did Jim love this book?

As with physique photographs, I never associated murder with gay history, but newspapers were full of reports of it, often in coded and lewd language, as early as the 1920s. The cases were virtually identical. An older man meets a younger, attractive one and invites him home. In a fit of ā€œhomosexual panicā€ after the older manā€™s ā€œindecent advanceā€ toward him, the younger kills the older but, tried, is found innocent, given a light sentence, or paroled. Juries, judges, newspaper reporters, and the police engaged in and promoted such extreme homophobia. Indecent Advances helped me understand a principal excuse our society used in an attempt to cover up its hatred of gay men. 

By James Polchin,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Indecent Advances as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A grisly, sobering, comprehensively researched new history.' - The New Yorker

Indecent Advances is a skilful hybrid of true crime and social history that examines the often-coded portrayal of crimes against gay men in the decades before Stonewall.

New York University professor and critic James Polchin illustrates how homosexuals were criminalized, and their murders justified, in the popular imagination from 1930s 'sex panics' to Cold War fear of Communists and homosexuals in government. He shows the vital that role crime stories played in ideas of normalcy and deviancy, and how those stories became tools to discriminate against and harm gayā€¦


Book cover of The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II

Janet Somerville Author Of Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War 1930-1949

From my list on women war correspondents.

Why am I passionate about this?

Janet Somerville taught literature for 25 years in Toronto. She served on the PEN Canada Board and chaired many benefits that featured writers including Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Alice Munro, Azar Nafisi, and Ian Rankin. She contributes frequently to the Toronto Star Book Pages, and has been handwriting a #LetterADay for 8 years. Since 2015 she has been immersed in Martha Gellhornā€™s life and words, with ongoing access to Gellhornā€™s restricted papers in Boston. Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhornā€™s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949 is her first book, now also available from Penguin Random House Audio, read by the Tony Award-winning Ellen Barkin. 

Janet's book list on women war correspondents

Janet Somerville Why did Janet love this book?

Like their male counterparts, Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, Clare Hollingworth, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Sigrid Schultz faced the danger inherent in reporting from war zones, but, unlike the men, these women often had to improvise to get access. Ever intrepid, Gellhorn noted, ā€œIf they donā€™t want to accredit you, you just do it, any little lie will do.ā€ 

By 1945 there were 250 women accredited to the Allied armies as reporters and photographers. Everyone had something to do that felt necessary, though post-war many were ā€œshredded up inside.ā€ With the narrative drive of a well-paced thriller, Mackrellā€™s essential work will have you reaching for more about the words and lives of these trailblazing six.

By Judith Mackrell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Correspondents as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The riveting, untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War IIā€”from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent.

"Thrilling from the first page to the last." ā€”Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women
 
"Just as women are so often written out of war, so it seems are the female correspondents. Mackrell corrects this omission admirably with stories of six of the bestā€¦Mackrell has done us all a great service by assembling their own fascinating stories." ā€”New York Times Book Review
 
Onā€¦


Book cover of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts

Mike Hulme Author Of Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity

From my list on the contested meanings of climate change.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been fascinated by the weather since as a schoolboy I avidly followed the cricket scores and the fate of tomorrowā€™s match. This co-dependence of my passion for cricket with the state of the weather turned into a professional career as, first, a research scientist and then later a professor of geography, I studied the idea of climate and the many ways in which it intersects with our social, ecological and imaginative worlds. As human-caused climate change became a defining public and political issue for the new century, my interests increasingly focused on understanding why people think so differently about the climate, its changes, its future trajectoryā€”and what to do about it. 

Mike's book list on the contested meanings of climate change

Mike Hulme Why did Mike love this book?

Too often, climate change debates reduce to throwing around scientific facts ā€“ how much warming, how soon will it happen, how many people will it affect, and so on. Candis Callison recognises that such arguments donā€™t get us very far when deciding what to do. There are different types of facts. In this book she shows why the facts about climate change that really matter in different human worlds ā€“ in corporations, in religious groups, amongst journalists, in village communities ā€“ are social facts; these are shared ā€˜factsā€™ about what climate change means to different social formations. And it is through these diverse communal facts that climate change comes to matter.

By Candis Callison,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked How Climate Change Comes to Matter as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.

The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moralā€¦


Book cover of They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900
Book cover of Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse
Book cover of Shame the Stars

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