THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET by Sandra Cisneros:  The work, now a staple of many school reading lists, captures the day-to-day life of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl who dreams of leaving her home in a poor Latino neighborhood of Chicago.  This touching tale is comprised of 44 short chapters – many of them only a few paragraphs long – and can be read in a single sitting.   The chapters are written in the style of diary entries, but the language is musing and poetic – one could almost read the individual chapters as prose poems.  For a young reader or student, this work is a great entry point into Latino literature.  Although written in English, it is also available in Spanish translation.    

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD by Gabriel García Márquez:  This is one of the lesser known works by Márquez, but it ranks among his finest.  While his more celebrated novels trace events over fifty or hundred year periods, Chronicle of a Death Foretold re-constructs the circumstances of a single day, when two angry brothers track down and murder the man they believe violated their sister’s virginity.  This is a rich work, and almost the mirror image of those novels in which strange coincidences and chance events save the protagonist.  Here all events conspire against a happy ending. Márquez constructs a beautiful plot, in which almost every episode seems to show a way in which the murder can be avoided.  But the bloodshed here is apparently pre-destined, and the death already foretold.    

DROWN by Junot Diaz:  Diaz’s recent novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has brought this flashy writer back into the limelight.  But readers should not forget his short story collection Drown from 1996.  Diaz dishes up a spicy prose style which seamlessly shifts from English to Spanish, from street talk to high-brow allusions.  But the playfulness of the language stands in stark contrast to the gritty realism of Diaz’s stories.  Here we find taunting and bullying, broken homes and infidelities, poverty and violence, but presented without self-pity or sentimentality.  Diaz is one of the finest writers chronicling the immigrant experience in contemporary America.   

THE STORYTELLER by Mario Vargas Llosa:   Many books have captured the rich heritage of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or have tried to depict the tragedy of their conflicts with European settlers.  But in this artfully constructed novel, Llosa takes a different angle, relating the story of Saul Zuratas, a Peruvian of Jewish descent, who attempts to leave behind the ties and complexities or urban life and become a member of an Amazonian tribe.  Here again Llosa shows his ability to build and pace a well-crafted narrative, while also exploring the larger issues of ethnicity and our often tainted historical legacies.     

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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