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Latino LGBTQ+ Reads

Adult and Teen book lists that feature Latino LGBTQ+ memoirs, poetry and fiction.

Books for Adults

Cover of The Adventures of China Ir
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Iona MacIntyre (Translator)
and Fiona Macintosh (Translator)

China Iron reimagines Argentina's macho national origin myth from a female perspective, in a joyful, hallucinatory journey across the pampas of 19th century.

Cover of After Rubén
Francisco
Aragon

Whether it's biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragâon has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua.

Cover of American Dreamer
Adriana
Herrera

An opportunity too good to pass up could mean a way to stay together and an incredible future for Nesto Vasquez and Jude Fuller…if Nesto can remember happiness isn’t always measured by business success and if Jude can overcome his past and trust his man will never let him down.

Cover of An Orphan World
Giuseppe Caputo, Sophie Hughes (Translator)
Juana Adcock (Translator)

A visionary novel about fathers and sons, sexual orientation, poverty, loneliness and love, set in a world of both prejudice and poverty, and dazzling, chaotic liberation.

Cover of Borderlands/La Frontera: T
Gloria
Anzaldúa

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

Cover of Born Both: An Intersex Lif
Hida
Viloria

Hida Viloria, writer and intersex activist, offers a candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of life, love, and gender identity as an intact intersex person, as well as a call to action for justice for intersex people.

Cover of Brown Neon
Raquel
Gutiérrez

Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez's debut essay collection gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. 

Cover of Cantoras
Carolina
De Robertis

In 1977 Uruguay, a military government has crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In an environment where citizens are kidnapped, raped, and tortured, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression. This is a novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find each other as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family.

Cover of Chulito
Charles
Rice-González

Set against a vibrant South Bronx neighborhood and the queer youth culture of Manhattan's piers, Chulito is a coming-of-age, coming out love story of a sexy, tough, hip hop-loving, young Latino man and the colorful characters who populate his block.

Cover of Dreaming of You: A Novel i
Melissa
Lozada-Oliva

A macabre novel in verse of loss, longing, and identity crises following a poet who resurrects pop star Selena from the dead.

Cover of Headless John the Baptist
C.T.
Salazar

The coming-of-age chronicle of a queer Latinx Southerner. In this debut poetry collection, the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South's historic and ongoing violence. 

Cover of In the Dream House: A Memo
Carmen Maria
Machado

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

Cover of The Life Assignment
Ricardo Alberto
Maldonado

In his debut collection, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado bends poems through bilingual lyrics that present spartan observation as evidence for its exacting verdict. As if sorting through a box of photographs, the speaker sorts through relationships, trying to discern what was healthy from what was exploitative. Concepts of love are turned over and over in these poems: romantic love, love of family, love of country, self-love (or lack thereof).

Cover of Mean
Myriam
Gurba

True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba's coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. 

Cover of Native Country of the Hear
Cherríe
Moraga

At its core, this is a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation.

Cover of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir
Jaquira
Díaz

Jaquira Díaz writes an unflinching account of growing up as a queer biracial girl searching for home as her family splits apart and her mother struggles with mental illness and addiction. From her own struggles with depression and drug abuse to her experiences of violence to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page vibrates with music and lyricism.

Cover of Postcolonial Love Poem: Po
Natalia
Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds.

Cover of The Rain God: A Desert Tal
Arturo
Islas

Set in a fictional small town on the Texas-Mexico border, it tells the funny, sad and quietly outrageous saga of the children and grandchildren of Mama Chona the indomitable matriarch of the Angel clan who fled the bullets and blood of the 1911 revolution for a gringo land of promise.

Cover of Sacrificio
Ernesto
Mestre-Reed

Set in Cuba in 1998, Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government.

Cover of We the Animals
Justin
Torres

Three brothers tear their way through childhood building kites from trash, hiding when their parents battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos, heartbreak, and euphoria.

Cover of When I Was Puerto Rican
Esmeralda
Santiago

From a rippled zinc shack in rural Puerto Rico to "the better life" in a decaying Brooklyn tenement, Esmerelda Santiago's Puerto Rican childhood is one of sorcery, smoldering war between the sexes, and high comedy. Hers is a portrait of a harsh but enchanted world that can never be reclaimed.

Teen Books

Cover of America. Vol. 1, The Life
Gabby
Rivera

America Chavez, gets her own series. She was a Young Avenger. She leads the Ultimates. And now she officially claims her place as the preeminent butt-kicker of the entire Marvel Universe. But what's a super-powered teenager to do when she's looking for a little personal fulfillment? She goes to college. America just has to stop an inter dimensional monster or two first.

Cover of Aristotle and Dante Dive I
Benjamin Alire
Sáenz

Aristotle and Dante continue their journey to manhood in this achingly romantic, tender tale set against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s America. Now they must learn what it means to stay in love-and to build their relationship in a world that doesn't seem to want them to exist.

Cover of Cemetery Boys
Aiden
Thomas

When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free. However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death.

Cover of The Grief Keeper
Alexandra
Villasante

After escaping a detention center at the U.S. border, seventeen-year-old Marisol agrees to participate in a medical experiment hoping to keep her and her younger sister, Gabi, from being deported to El Salvador.

Cover of Indivisible
Daniel
Aleman

When Mateo Garcia returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken by ICE, he realizes that his family's worst nightmare has become a reality. With his parents' fate and his own future hanging in the balance, Mateo must figure out who he is and what he is capable of, even as he's forced to question what it means to be an American.

Cover of Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn B
Zoraida
Córdova

The first book in the Latinx-infused Queer fantasy series that follows three sisters--and teen witches--as they develop their powers and battle magic through epic questing in the realms beyond.

Cover of The Lesbiana's Guide to Ca
Sonora
Reyes

Sixteen-year-old Mexican American Yami Flores starts Catholic school, determined to keep her brother out of trouble and keep herself closeted, but her priorities shift when Yami discovers that her openly gay classmate Bo is also annoyingly cute.

Cover of Only Mostly Devastated
Sophie
Gonzalez

Ollie never expected his summer fling with unbearably sweet Will to survive after vacation, but when his family decides to stay in North Carolina, he lets himself hope. Those hopes are crushed when he learns that the guy he knew from summer isn't the same one attending Collinswood High.

Cover of Self-Made Boys: A Great Ga
Anna-Marie
McLemore

Nicolás Caraveo, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Wisconsin, has no interest in the New York City's glamour. Going to New York is all about establishing himself as a young professional, which could set up his future--and his life as a man--and benefit his family.

Cover of They Both Die At the End
Adam
Silvera

In a near-future New York City where a service alerts people on the day they will die, teenagers Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio meet using the Last Friend app and are faced with the challenge of living a lifetime on their End Day.

Cover of This Is How We Fly
Anna
Meriano

Grounded for the summer by her sometimes-evil stepmother, seventeen-year-old vegan feminist Ellen Lopez-Rourke gets permission to join a Quidditch team, where she makes new, if nerdy, friends.

Cover of We Set the Dark on Fire
Tehlor Kay
Mejia

In this daring and romantic fantasy, society-wife-in-training Dani has a great awakening after being recruited by rebel spies and falling for her biggest rival.