UChicagoReads features books written by UChicago staff, faculty, students, and alumni or those written about University topics. Do you know of a book we should feature? Do you have a book of your own? Email us at uchicagointranet@uchicago.edu.

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, this edition of UChicagoReads features a selection of books by Hispanic authors from the University of Chicago community. This diverse collection includes books ranging from a gothic horror novel to a history of barrios in American cities to a recovery of Yiddish anarchist history and literature.

The Hacienda

Isabel Cañas
© 2022 | 352 pages

Synopsis

Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca in this debut supernatural suspense novel, set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, about a remote house, a sinister haunting, and the woman pulled into their clutches.

In the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father is executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security his estate in the countryside provides. But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined.

About the author

Isabel Cañas, known outside her writing as Isabel Lachenauer (PhD’22), earned her PhD in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where she specialized in the literature and cultural history of late medieval Anatolia. Her research, including her dissertation, Artūḫı Wept: Reading Emotions in ʿĀrif ʿAlī’s Dānişmendnāme, encompasses the study of emotions and gender in Old Anatolian Turkish popular literature and romance. Under her pen name, Isabel Cañas is a Mexican-American speculative fiction writer. After having lived in Mexico, Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, and New York City, among other places, she has settled in the Pacific Northwest. She writes fiction inspired by her research and her heritage.

Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City

Andrew Sandoval-Strausz
© 2019 

Synopsis

Thirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class" of young professionals who revived a moribund urban America in the 1990s and 2000s. But this stunning reversal owes much more to another, far less visible group: Latino and Latina newcomers.

Award-winning historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz reveals this history by focusing on two barrios: Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff. These neighborhoods lost residents and jobs for decades before Latin American immigration turned them around beginning in the 1970s. As Sandoval-Strausz shows, Latinos made cities dynamic, stable, and safe by purchasing homes, opening businesses, and reviving street life. Barrio America uses vivid oral histories and detailed statistics to show how the great Latino migrations transformed America for the better.

About the author

Andrew Sandoval-Strausz (PhD’02) is a Professor of History at Penn State where he teaches courses in Latino studies, urban history, spatial theory, sociability, and immigration. He is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians. His first book, Hotel: An American History (Yale University Press, 2007), won the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2007 by Library Journal.

Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature

Anna Elena Torres
© 2024 | 344 pages 

Synopsis

Spanning the last two centuries, this recovery of Yiddish anarchist history and literature combines archival research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish poetry to offer an original literary study of the Jewish anarchist movement. The narrative unfolds through a cast of historical characters, from the well-known—such as Emma Goldman—to the more obscure. Its literary scope includes the Soviet epic poemas of Peretz Markish, the journalism and modernist poetry of Anna Margolin, and the early radical prose of Malka Heifetz Tussman.

Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critique of the border. Jewish deportees, immigrants, and refugees opposed citizenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead, they cultivated stateless imaginations, elaborated through literature.

About the author

Anna Elena Torres is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and The College at the University of Chicago. Torres is a scholar of Comparative Literature specializing in Jewish Studies. Her current work examines how Yiddish Literature was informed by mass migration and movements for human rights beyond the frames of statism and nationalism. Her ongoing projects include a comparative study of racialization, indigeneity, and colonial education in Puerto Rico and Native American residential schools in the United States.