"Latino" - What is it?

Searching for Latinidad

A number of my friends sent me a link to the New York Times review of a new book by Héctor Tobar, novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Only two days later I opened my Mother's Day gift from my son—Tobar’s book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.”               

“Most Latin American immigrants and their children, documented or undocumented, live with regret, haunted by the life choices that have split their families.”

What an oddly wonderful book. Our Migrant Souls is broad in scope, a meditation on what holds us together—with no easy answers. It’s full of longing, who are we as Latinos?

Tobar talks to people who identify as Latino as he travels across the country. He reveals poignant conversations with his university students and examines his own and his parents' stories of migration from Guatemala.

He also looks at the histories of "Empire" in Latin America (in my era, we said, “the Colossus of the North”), their impact on migration to the United States and the social forces within the United States that help define Latinidad. He describes "Latino" as as a loose, catchall term—a racial and ethnic identity across the United States—one fourth of the American population, a second class that is rarely seen.

The book is soulful and rich. It deepens our sense of the moral obligations we have for one another. Every American should read it.

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Some words rattling around inside my head:

Latinidad
why
wanting
comfort
struggles
knowing
language
access to another human
a softness
a peopleness
humanity
I was raised this way
it's what I know