Héctor Tobar

Presents a firsthand, official account of the 2010 survival story involving thirty-three miners who were trapped for a record sixty-nine days in a Chilean mine.

The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

Deep Down Dark

A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino

Our Migrant Souls

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.

A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a “road bum,” an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum. A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson’s freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador—a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism. The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live—a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off.

A Novel

The Last Great Road Bum

After the husband and wife that she works for disappear, live-in maid Araceli takes their two boys on a journey through sprawling Los Angeles to locate their grandfather.

The barbarian nurseries

BY THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AND PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE 33 'A book of extraordinary scope and power' Los Angeles Times Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household, just outside Los Angeles. One morning, after an argument between the parents which turned physical, she wakes to an empty house - except for the two sons she's never had to interact with before. Not knowing what else to do, she decides to track down their grandfather. When Scott and Maureen return to find the children gone, they do what any right-minded middle-class parents would: they panic. Caught in a spiral of guilt, they say things that aren't quite true - and when Araceli is accused of abduction, a national media circus explodes, causing the Torres-Thompson's carefully constructed lives to begin to fall apart . . . 'As pacy and informative about the states of America as you would expect from a journalist who won a Pulitzer for coverage of the LA riots . . . Tobar is in total control of his material' Guardian 'A virtuosic and hard-hitting novel . . . Exposes disturbing and enlightening ironies about the perpetuation of both privilege and social disadvantage' TLS Tobar's hard-hitting novel drills deep into LA's hidden social and racial strata, and explores what happens when these carefully constructed lives implode Independent

A shocking and unforgettable novel about class differences in modern-day America

The Barbarian Nurseries

Presents the story of two men, Antonio Bernal and Guillermo Longorio, who are haunted by memories of tragedy in Guatemala and whose lives intersect at the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Reprint.

The Tattooed Soldier

L'estate dei barbari

Leticia Hernández-Linares

Rubén Martínez

Tia Chucha Press is proud to present an anthology of Central American writers living in the United States. It features work that captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latino groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a U.S. publisher, perfect for high school, college, or university courses in U.S. literature, Latino literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies. A multi-genre collection--including poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction--the book showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences, as refugees from the wars of the 1980s to those who barely remember the homeland or who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. Yet it is a community that shares a history of violence--both here and back home--and the hope and healing that ensures its survival. They include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle--El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras--considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.

Central American Writing in the United States

The Wandering Song

Scott Tores is a thirty-something Mexican-American with a beautiful, blonde wife, Maureen, a mansion outside L.A., and a staff of servants to tend his lawn, clean his house, and care for their three children. But as the novel opens, all the servants have been let go, save for Araceli, the maid. Scott has fallen on hard times after a failed investment and in order to make ends meet has been forced to cut costs. With the recent addition of a newborn into their family, tension escalates, and the couple soon part ways, Maureen to a spa with their baby, Scott to a female co-worker’s house. Both believe the other is caring for the children. Araceli, who has never raised children before, spends more time daydreaming about her former life as a Mexico City artist than caring for the kids. When she starts to run out of food, she spirits the children off on an absurd adventure through Los Angeles in search of their Mexican-American grandfather. When Maureen and Scott finally return home, they panic, thinking Araceli has kidnapped the children. Soon a national media circus explodes over the “abduction.” The Barbarian Nurseries is a lush, highly populated social novel in the vein of Tom Wolfe with a bit of T.C. Boyle that explores dashed dreams through a city divided.

Barbarian Nurseries

'A gripping narrative, taut to the point of explosion ...An electrifying, empathetic work of journalism that makes a four-year-old story feel fresh' Kirkus, starred review Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Hector Tobar offers the definitive account of a heart-stopping survival story: the 2010 collapse of the San Jose mine and the international rescue effort that somehow managed to save all 33 miners, who had been trapped half a mile beneath the surface for 69 days. The rescue was watched by more 1 billion viewers worldwide. No other writer has been granted the deep and exclusive access to the miners that Hector Tobar has, and no one else can capture and recreate this unique drama so vividly, from the conflicts and the emotions that enveloped the men during their first fortnight below ground, when death by starvation loomed as their likely fate, to the subsequent weeks during which they established contact with the outside world. All the while, they remain trapped inside a still-thundering mountain that could collapse upon them at any moment.

A dramatic account of the 33 miners of the San Jose mine in Chile, in official collaboration with 'The 33' and with the full cooperation of the Chilean authorities behind the daring rescue operation.

The exclusive, official story of the survival, faith, and family of Chile’s 33 Trapped Miners, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist When Chile’s San José mine collapsed outside of Copiapó in August, 2010, it trapped 33 miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking 69 days. And across the globe, we sat riveted to television and computer screens while journalists flocked to the Atacama Desert. While we saw what transpired above ground during the grueling and protracted rescue, the story of the miners’ lives buried below the earth’s surface—and the lives that led them there—hasn’t been heard until now. In Deep Down Dark, this master work of a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Héctor Tobar gains exclusive access to the miners and their stories. The result is a miraculous and emotionally textured account of the 33 men who came to think of the San José mine as a kind of coffin, as a “cave” inflicting constant and thundering aural torment, and as a church where they sought redemption through prayer, while the world watched from above. It offers an understanding of the families and personal histories that brought “los 33” to the mine, and the mystical and spiritual elements that surrounded working at such a dangerous place.

Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Hector Tobar offers the definitive account of a heart-stopping survival story: the 2010 collapse of the San Jose mine and the international rescue effort that somehow managed to save all 33 miners, who had been trapped half a mile beneath the surface for 69 days. The rescue was watched by more 1 billion viewers worldwide. No other writer has been granted the deep and exclusive access to the miners that Hector Tobar has, and no one else can capture and recreate this unique drama so vividly, from the conflicts and the emotions that enveloped the men during their first fortnight below ground, when death by starvation loomed as their likely fate, to the subsequent weeks during which they established contact with the outside world. All the while, they remain trapped inside a still-thundering mountain that could collapse upon them at any moment.

Héctor Tobar

About

Books

Join the club