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Héctor Tobar
May 17 @ 6:00 pm
This event will be held instore at City Lights. It will also be broadcast on zoom. To experience the virtual part of the event you will need a device that can access the internet and registration is required.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Héctor Tobar discusses his new book
Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” published by MCD – This event will be both broadcast online and take place inside City Lights Bookstore located at 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco. Those of you who have registered for a virtual event will be able to experience it on zoom. Although facial covering is not mandatory for this event, we highly recommend it. Seating is on a first come, first serve basis. No registration required for the in-store event, Registration is however required to view the virtual portion of this program.
Héctor Tobar
discussing his new book
Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
published by MCD
A new book by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.
“Latino” is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar’s personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of “Latino” as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about “illegals” and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation.
Investigating topics that include the US-Mexico border “wall,” Frida Kahlo, urban segregation, gangs, queer Latino utopias, and the emergence of the cartel genre in TV and film, Tobar journeys across the country to expose something truer about the meaning of “Latino” in the twenty-first century.
Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed, New York Times bestseller, Deep Down Dark, as well as The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. Héctor is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He’s written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, Zyzzyva, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/