Our Migrant Souls; A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” by Héctor Tobar is a powerful must read. I was truly thankful to have gotten to read this before most people! I would like to purchase this one for my physical library!

This was a hard read for me, Hector Tobar holds nothing back as he brings to the readers' attention the experiences of race and what it means to be "Latino" in the United States. I am not of Latino heritage, but the way Tobar tackles stereotypes and questions that may arise when somebody explores identity within the United States is worth while.

Tobar's book is an engaging and accessible read for those dipping their toes into the field of Latino/x Studies. With a combination of memoir and scholarship, this is a great way to introduce key themes and concepts that resonate with students. There are some moments when I wish he also brought in joteria studies, but I suppose that's for another book and author.

Our Migrant Souls offers an in-depth look at race, ethnicity, gender and other constructs, particularly as they relate to Latinos in the US. He looks at the myriad identities of Latinos/Latinx/Latine people in the US, attempting to define their experiences, highlighting differences and similarities. 
 
Numerous passages from this excellent book resonated with me, among them: 
 
"Most Latin American immigrants and their children, documented or undocumented, live with regret, haunted by the life choices that have split their families." and 
 
"Race is a performance...It's a set of clothes thrust upon us, or that we don proudly, a costume pulled off the great thrift-store rack called United States history. But man of us still believe that race is supposed to describe the essence of us, an indelible truth. We can't change our race. So we struggle when the clothes of a racial and ethnic identity don't quite fit us." 
 
There is a lot to retain in the pages of this book and one that you may want to mark up and highlight.

A powerful and necessary voice that will resonate with those who have lived through the complex experience of immigration and assimilation.

This book is interesting to me because I have spent most of my life in the Southwest US and married a Hispanic man of Sephardic Jewish descent. Although racism does exist in this country, there are many issues that this book does not address. Religion for example as many migrants came from Spain and Portugal, and some of them migrated through Central America and South America. The author also does address racism with the Latino community, or between the Black and the Latino community.

What a beautiful work on the topics of identity, culture, ego, and deep unconsciousness, the history that shaped the lives of millions of people whom we all collectively fail to acknowledge and differentiate.
I am so grateful to the author for educating me in the subject.

I appreciate what Tobar attempted to do here, but it fell flat.

I think Tobar lacked the experience and knowledge to write what he set out to do, Or perhaps he just lacked relevant life experiences. He discusses the American view on Latinos in ways that were common 30 years ago, or in some obscure part of the midwest (this is not to say that those experiences are not important, and essential in the view of Latinos, but a rather small drop in the ocean that is the Latino experience).

I would love to see this text revisited and expanded in a few years, with input from many more important voices in the Latino community.

As a queer Puerto Rican, I found this read to be very informative and close to home. Tobar explores a range of topics and conversations within the Latinx community. While I found the pacing in the middle to be a bit slow, I’m glad I finished this read. My favorite component of this was actually towards the end, when Tobar spoke to a variety of Latine people. The Latin American diaspora was captured— from young DREAMERS to conservative Latinos. I can definitely see myself picking up this book again.

Our Migrant Souls is my favorite nonfiction book of the year. Period. I cancelled my plans and finished reading it in one day. Simply put, it made me cry. A lot. As someone who identifies as Latina, I felt such a roller coaster of emotions from start to finish. I felt these strong emotions for myself and the journey of the battle of my own identity, I felt it for my family who migrated to the states and the complexities that fact has brought to our lives, and I felt it for other Latinos outside of my own experiences. As a rush of memories flooded me while reading, so did the tears. It's not just the content that hits close to home, or the eye opening facts that punched me in the gut. Hector's writing style and tone held me by the heart. It felt like sitting at the table for sobremesa with a tio or abuelo telling me all these important, powerful, and validating things. I felt comforted, angered, impassioned, and seen. This book is everything I needed, and it will stay with me for a long time. I highly recommend this book to everyone, whether you identify as a part of the Latinidad or not.

Our Migrant Souls was an informative experience and I appreciated how Tobar shared not only his personal experiences but also those of his students'. It's a pretty short book and there's quite a lot going on and a variety of subjects are being discussed so just wished some of then were more in-depth.

I am excited to share a recent release that has captured my attention: Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”, an excellent essay collection by the Pulitzer–winning author, Héctor Tobar. It’s important to include the full title here because it encapsulates the essence of this book: a deep reflection and exploration of the Latino identity and experience in the United States, and a critical examination of its relativity to whiteness, indigeneity, and blackness across time.

In the book, Tobar demystifies the Latino stereotypes often portrayed by the media, television, and films. Through sharing his own family’s story as Guatemalan immigrants and recounting his experience interviewing Latinos across the country, Tobar humanizes the Latino experience and allows the readers to understand more deeply what it means to be Latino. He also sheds light on the often-unseen impact of life-altering, traumatic events, such as border-crossing and forced family separation, on migrant workers’ psyches.

Most of all, Tobar’s storytelling shows a lot of love, empathy, and pride toward this resilient community of people from heritage across the continents who share a story of empire and displacement. It’s a book full of poignant and heart-breaking stories, intertwined with moments of triumph and pride.

Thank you, Macmillan and NetGalley, for the advanced reader copy. All opinions are my own.

As in all issues with two loud and opposing poles, in talking about “race,” groups positioned between Black and White are often rendered irrelevant. This book acts as a corrective for the varied peoples labelled as Latino, Latin(x), or Hispanic in the United States—people who, as Tobar says, keep the United States running in quiet and unobtrusive ways. They are gardeners, farm workers, nannies, construction workers, mechanics, teachers and professors, doctors, dentists, and a million thing besides. Yet they—for their labour, in their humanity—often remain unacknowledged, perhaps because of the invisibility of the caste they’ve been assigned to in the American imagination, as a(n often) menial labour force.

Tobar’s treatise is both a lament and a call to hope, not just for Latin(x) people, but for other marginalised peoples of the United States. Mostly, though, it is a love letter to these people who are united, perhaps, only by the mixedness of their heritage: Spanish, Afro-descent, and Indigenous South American, and additionally everything else a person can be. Tobar asks us to come on a journey, meeting people in Los Angeles, the city of his birth; and then across the US, down to the border with Mexico, with all the complexities thereof—the Wall, separated families, undocumented migrants, unaccompanied minors. He takes us to Guatemala, where his family originated; and then back to L. A. and across the US to meet all kinds of Latin(x) people in all kinds of places, from a Mormon in Utah, to a Donald Trump supporter in Idaho, and young Puerto Rican-Americans in Spanish Harlem. To be Latin(x), it seems, is not only to be mestizo, or mixed, but also to have stories of migration flowing through your veins.

Tobar’s words are poetic, and sometimes read like Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches (which may not be accidental, as it happens). But he has poured what feels like his entire heart and soul into helping readers understand the power, pain and beauty of all of the various, mostly invisible people the US has classed—raced—into this group. He unravels for us all that we must see, in opposition to the drive to make “Brown” peoples an undifferentiated horde of migrant criminals—as that recent US president and his supporters have tried to do. At the end of the book, Tobar also reminds us what the ultimate point of reinforcing such ideas always is: it is in the service of capitalism, and the imperial agenda. He asks us to resist, and to dream in new ways of new utopias—unworlding, as N. K. Jemisin would put it, and also the example of the resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s. That’s the message I have taken away from the book; but all of the stories of individuals that Tobar shares in it will also stay with me.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD for this ARC.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer writer with many successful books behind him that I’ve never read, but that I will definitely add to my wishlist after reading his newest release « Our Migrant Souls » (already available to purchase).

In this informative yet emotional essay, Tobar brings the reader around the United States both geographically and historically speaking, uncovering and dismantling the meaning and myths of being “Latino” today, but also of notions so commonly used as “race” and “ethnicity”. He does so not through the sterility of definitions, numbers, or statistics, but through history and most importantly through people and their stories.

This essay is short, yet it effectively showcases the global condition of “the migrant” while not stripping the migration experience of its multiplicity of experiences. He places people’s experiences at the center of the paradox of the migrant in the United States: constantly needed yet constantly mistreated. While it is an essay centered on the USA context, I felt that many concepts and reflections expressed in the essay apply to the universal migrant experience, and I could not avoid thinking about how the same paradoxes apply to migrants in Italy (my country).

« "Ethnicity" and “race" are sold to us as boxes containing our skin tones and our surnames, but the truth about you, about us, will not fit in any box. »

I am Mexican who has lived her whole here. That being said the whole “are people born in the USA latinos” debate has always been really interesting for me, and this book offers an inside about their story and the way they see themselves in society.

Hector Tobar begins the book talking about how the viewing of the Star Wars movies is a kind of rite of passage with American children. This imagery flows throughout the book, and it might be hard for Americans to hear of their country as The Death Star. What I do appreciate is that Hector does say that the US-Mexico boarder was born of competition between multiple countries. This is something I'm not sure is covered in modern social studies classes. What I also appreciated about this book is that Hector spends time explaining which parts of the United States used to belong to Mexico.

The tone of this book is ironically exactly what Tobar was hoping for. He is indeed the "voice of the weary sage". He writes of the stories of parents and grandparents and how their story should impact the next generation. He speaks intimately of the history of Los Angeles. He questions belonging even after centuries and ideas of race since it is only an idea as old as the 1600s, discussing Portuguese and Jewish segregation in Los Angeles. At one point honestly he answered questions I asked my middle school teacher in the 1990s when I learned about segregation. "I'm not Northern European, I'm not black. Where would I sit on the bus?" According to Tobar it depends on the time of year, being that my olive skin tans dark in the summer but I can "pass" for a "real white" person" in the cooler months.

Readers should note that he uses the term "Latinx" at some point in the book and I have to confess that I am part of the 97% of Latinos who does not like this term. This might lead some to assume the ideology he subscribes to as he writes this book.

Over all, I think this book is worth reading, especially for Americans who have a limited understanding of Latinos in California, and who wonder how the US came to be in possession of much of what used to be called Mexico.

Over all his story is valuable and I am happy he wrote it. I am giving it three stars because while it was an interesting read, I believe once was enough.

Thank you this is my honest review,

I received an early copy of this text through Net Galley. I loved this book. I think it 100% captured the truth behind the heart-breaking, difficult, and life-changing decisions that immigrant families must face when they decide whether to make the trip to the US (or not). Then they must also decide whether to do this as a family or to divide their immediate family. I insert the word "immediate" because those who are first or second generation -Americans will know that there is tons of family left behind in one's home country.

We hear about them all the time. And if you are anything like me, you often wonder exactly what your life would've been like if your parent would've made the opposite choice. What if they had stayed? What would your life be like now?

I know my parents' reasons why. I know they had to move in order to have any chance at survival. This text just reminded me that they, like many other had to give up so much in order to make my life one that they considered a higher quality than the alternative. I give it all the stars!!

Héctor Tobar weaves together essays, personal experiences, and history to create a book about what it means to be Latino. I really enjoyed Tobar's writing style, but at times it was a bit jarring with the pacing. Overall, I'd definitely recommend this to anyone interested in the topic.

Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" is a powerful book that explores the complex development, meaning, and identity of "Latino." Tobar organizes chapters by themes titled: Empires, Walls, Beginnings, Cities, Race, Intimacies, Secrets, Lies, Light, and Home, each weaving a variety of generational perspectives, historical events, sociocultural developments, and personal accounts of Tobar and his family as well as his students and their families. This beautifully written collection of essays contains the linguistic elegance of poetry, the depth of sociocultural research, and the heartfelt connection of memoir. The following characterization of "empire" illustrates this point: "Stories about empire move us because they're echoes of the memories that reside deep in our collective consciousness. We live in a world of migrating peoples and interconnected markets, a global system of wealth creation built upon acts of violence."

The focus of the book shifts towards the end as Tobar describes traveling across the United States visiting Latinos living in a variety of contexts throughout the country. This section feels a bit disjointed from the rest of the book in that it reads like a traveling narrative describing encounters with individuals along a journey. Nevertheless, the book is an engaging and insightful read well balanced with historical and sociological research coupled with heartfelt personal experiences.

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux publishing for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

One of the best non-fiction books I have read so far this year. This is my first exposure to the author, and this book drew me immediately. There is a photo of him and his mother and he writes using "you" as in talking about his mother's history but expands to talking to his students. He weaves personal narratives from his life, from his students and history. It is grounded in Los Angeles where he grew up and he weaves through Thomas Dixon whose book ended up becoming the film "Birth of A Nation" to living next door to James Earl Ray. He talks about racial constructs as pertains to Latinos/Hispanics and Latinx.. His chapters are simply titled - Empires, Walls, Beginnings, cities, Race, Intimacies, Secrets, Lies, Light, and Home - yet the way he weaves different generational perspectives, personal histories, cultural histories and feelings is incredibly beautiful and moving. One of the particularly moving passages to me was when his young son asked (upon seeing the border wall between Mexico and the U.S. extend into the water -- "can't people just swim around the wall?" - how do you tell a young child what the ramifications for anyone who tried that would be (he equates it to how black parents have to have the "talk" with their children about encounters with the police. And as a professor, having to explain to his young students who are writing about their parents but don't seem to know what they were fleeing when they came to America.

I highly recommend this book.
Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC and I left an honest review.