Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories »

ILAN STAVANS is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He lives in Amherst and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

From the mean streets of the barrio to the house on Mango Street, from the Mambo Kings to the Garcia Girls, the authors who contribute to this volume transport us across geographies and through cultures in an attempt to articulate the joys, struggles, defeats, and triumphs of the Latino experience in the United States. Growing Up Latino offers, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of classic and recent Latino writing in English, converging in sometimes shocking, often funny, and always stirring memoirs and stories. Religion, sex, love, language, and family are some of the topics explored in this compelling anthology of fiction and nonfiction. With its laughter and tears, its beauty and power, it is a thoroughly enjoyable book and an unforgettable contribution to the Latino tradition of letters. This diverse collection shatters the myth of a singular U.S.- Latino experience, proving the existence of a rich tradition whose writers, active for more than forty years, are only now being recognized by a rapidly growing audience.