Top Latino Books To Connect You to Your Roots

Top Latino Books To Connect You to Your Roots | Audible.com

Latino and Hispanic culture is a multi-voiced culture composed of individuals from across Latin America and beyond. This list of audiobooks celebrates the stories of Latina and Latino authors and history. Whether you can relate, reminisce, or discover something new from these tales, they will help you reconnect with Latino and Hispanic roots, reminisce, or reflect on your own stories and heritage. These powerful voices are diverse and beautiful, but together they paint the picture of what it means to be Hispanic.

Listen to a classic from the land of your ancestors, relate to stories of immigration, or connect with characters that represent your loved ones or yourself. These top Latino stories were each famous for introducing new ideas, spotlight historical events, or discussing cultural moments in their country’s history. Each audiobook is an integral piece of the picture of Hispanic and Latino culture.

You can find the Spanish version of this list here.

Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse

William Neuman

This book documents the decline of Venezuela—a country rich, in theory, but suffering one of the biggest crises of our time. Author William Neuman combines extensive research with his firsthand experience of Venezuela’s descent into poverty, corruption, and mass emigration, ultimately leading to the tragic loss of a vibrant culture. Candid, blunt, and informative, this book is a riveting account of events and history, both personal and political. Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse includes tales of individual families and on a wider scale, a look at the corrupt, power-hungry system that exploited a once dynamic country and transformed it into a shell of its former self. Throughout, Neuman does not shy away from hard truths and tragedy, yet still shines a light on the resilient, beautiful, and passionate nature of Venezuela and its people.

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Mujeres de fuego [Women of Fire]

Elvira Liceaga, Diego Rabasa, Ricardo Giraldo

In 2011 in Cheran, the women finally had enough. This is their story. Mujeres de Fuego (Women of Fire) details the resistance formed by the women of Cheran, who took a stand against illegal deforestation and challenged the state that was ruthlessly taking their land and way of life. Powerful, emotional, and groundbreaking, this audiobook gives life to their voices and their fight. It is an excellent balance between highlighting the personal lives of these women and the overall issues of greed and power, which continue only to take, destroying more and more of the natural beauty of Mexico.

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Velorio

Xavier Navarro Aquino

In his debut novel, Xavier Navarro Aquino writes a powerful story of resilience and a community torn apart but not broken. Velorio (Wake) takes place after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, and follows the stories of several characters impacted by the great storm and its devastation. As they attempt to band together, these survivors will face their past heartaches, traumas, and vulnerabilities, and tap into their own inner strengths and capacity for hope. The compelling tales of individual characters are balanced with an overarching story of survival, unity, and the goodness in people. Striking and affecting, Velorio is not to be missed.

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I, Rigoberta Menchú

Rigoberta Menchú, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray - Edited by, Ann Wright - Translated by

I, Rigoberta Menchú tells the story of the life of an Indigenous woman who, like thousands in Latin America, suffered the consequences of a society that segregated and oppressed the first inhabitants of the area. Her family was assassinated by the Guatemalan militia, and from a young age, she decided to get involved in the fight against them in order to vindicate her own pain. This audiobook, in which she narrates the first years of her life and how her social conscience was born, was written in conjunction with the Venezuelan anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos. The work undoubtedly played a very important role in the jury's decision to award Menchú the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. The award brought her worldwide fame and has allowed her voice to be heard with greater force in international forums.This is a stunning and impactful story you won’t want to miss.

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The Death of Artemio Cruz

Carlos Fuentes, Alfred MacAdam - translator

Carlos Carlos Fuentes put together an extraordinary X-ray of the first half of the 20th century in Mexico in this audiobook. From his deathbed, Artemio Cruz remembers his adventures in the Revolution, his rise in national politics, his consolidation as a businessman and his failures in love. With superb mastery, the Mexican writer and son of a diplomat plays with different time periods, characters and even levels of consciousness throughout the novel. The stylistic innovation and the power of the plot enshrined it as one of the great works of Latin American literature of all time. Those who listen to it will understand how cronyism and dirty games were handled in the politics of a country that experienced a revolution that did not cause major social changes.

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The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

'The fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.' This quote, replicated hundreds of thousands of times on social networks, belongs to this book, Paulo Coelho's most famous work. It tells the story of Santiago, a shepherd who sets out on an eventful journey that serves as a beautiful allegory about finding oneself. The Rio de Janeiro-born author has said that he finished it in just two weeks because it was already written on his soul. The Alchemist holds the Guinness record for the most copies of a title signed the same day in different languages. It’s one of the most successful books of all time, selling more than 65 million copies across the world and has been translated into 63 languages and published in more than 150 countries.

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By Night in Chile

Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translation

After his death, at age fifty, Bolaño became one of the most influential writers in the Spanish language. This work helps to understand Chile, his homeland, at the time of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. A short novel, the story centers on the confession of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a priest of the right-wing Opus Dei congregation, who was also a literary critic. The anecdote revolves around the complicity that priests and people of letters had with the horrors committed by the despot. Listening to this work, where revelation plays a special role, is like being in the middle of a stormy night from which you don’t know how you’ll emerge.

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Optic Nerve

Maria Gainza, Thomas Bunstead - translator

Argentine writer’s María Gaínza’s debut, this eleven chapter audiobook consists of eleven stories, each of them featuring a painter, a painting, and an era. With impeccable workmanship, Gaínza finds how to intertwine them with the ordinary life of a Buenos Aires family that belongs to a bourgeoisie that has fallen into disrepair. The narrating voice is that of a young, sensitive and intelligent woman, who inherits a lot from her author. After all, María lives in Buenos Aires and dedicates herself to art criticism. This is, above all, an unclassifiable audiobook in which life and art are interwoven.

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El amor en los tiempos del cólera [Love in the Time of Cholera]

Gabriel García Márquez

Choosing only one of Nobel Prize winner’s Gabriel García Márquez’s works felt like an impossible task. We winded up selecting Love in the Times of Cholera because it’s the novel that brings us most intimately into his family history. García Márquez was inspired by the lives of his parents to write one of the most famous love stories in literature. This is a story where love triumphs despite fate and the obstacles brought forth by both families. This classic among classics has been translated into dozens of languages and made into a commercially successful movie. There’s no denying that this great Colombian novel deserves a place in your audio library, whether you consider yourself a romantic or want to get in touch with your Latino roots.

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Hot Sur

Laura Restrepo, Ernesto Mestre-Reed - translator

Another classic from Colombia is Hot Sur. It’s a story that recounts the saga of three Latina women who go to the United States in search of the 'American dream.' The mother struggles to reach it while the daughters struggle to escape a nightmare. A crime, mystery, love, violence, gang rituals but, above all, women who abandon their children to seek an opportunity 'on the other side' are some of the components of this profound work of literature.The story, written by a Colombian author based in Mexico, also traverses borders: that of fantasy and reality, that of journalism and literature, that of pure fiction and documentary. A thriller full of humor and horror that promises not to leave those who approach and listen to it feeling indifferent.

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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Díaz

In this audiobook, Junot Díaz delivers a series of stories that unravel the laws of love. Children who suffer the disappointments of their parents, men who become victims of what they did to their ex-partners, and the inevitable and terrible suffering that comes with trying to recover what is irretrievably lost. The protagonists of the stories are curvy Caribbean women who come across Yunior's life, a kind of alter ego of the author who also narrated The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a work for which the Dominican author won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Although located in New Jersey, the work is loaded with beautiful references to Santo Domingo, in a clear autobiographical allegory.

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Open Veins of Latin America

Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende - Foreward

This audiobook is a journalistic essay that focuses on the clash between European powers and pre-Hispanic America. The Uruguayan author, Galeano, analyzes the history of the region, from the Conquest to the consequences of colonialism that are still evident in many Latin American societies. The central premise is that the current problems of these nations are due to the looting suffered in the past. 'The open veins' work as a metaphor for the wealth that has been drawn like blood drawn from a vein.A must - read to try to understand the region from a left - wing perspective and discern why Latinos are the way we are.

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Island Treasures

Alma Flor Ada, Antonio Martorell

The author was born in Cuba and in this collection of stories she dedicates herself to recreating her first years on the Caribbean island. They are inspiring stories in which love and family traditions play an important role. First discoveries, the affection of the elders and the charm of making your first friends are narrated through the voice of a restless girl. The magical aspect that permeates each and every one of them is that no matter where the listener has grown up, they will surely find something in them to identify with. Professor Emerita at the University of San Francisco, Alma Flor has dedicated her life to promoting an inclusive pedagogy oriented to social justice and personal fulfillment.

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