From the NWHA Archives and Library

Latin X Experience Collection (2)

House on Mango Street - by Sandra Cisneros
The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, who, growing up in Chicago, invents for herself who and what she will become. “In English, my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting."

Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and taking pride in where one comes from.
Paper,  pages 110, pub. 1991

Chicano Magical Realism: A River of Wolves –
by S. Doc Estrada-Carreño, Ph.D (Author)
This is a memoir by Dr. Jesus Carrera Guerra, who recounts his deathbed stories of a life marked by wolves chasing him. It begins in a Mexican American Varrio, Las Tripas Secas—the Dry Huts —in Anaheim, California, in the 1950s, and continues through the convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately finding some resolution in the 21st century. There is a loss and discovery of love.

Throughout this book, you will find a tender compassion that forms its heartbeat. Alcoholism and addiction seem to have him by the throat, but out of the darkness emerges a mysterious Curandero, Don Gregorio, who becomes his Spiritual Guide and teaches him how to work with the energies of tonalli, which form the material, and nuahualli, the subtle energy that moves the universe and human life. It is this wisdom that lights the way from this life to the next.
Paper, pages 291, pub.1991