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OCTOBER 2020 2ND PRINT - Preorder Now!

Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States

Edited by Leticia Hernández Linares, Rubén Martínez, and Héctor Tobar

Tia Chucha Press is proud to reprint our successful anthology of Central American writers living in the United States. This collection 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. 

LETICIA HERNÁNDEZ LINARES is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl and a three-time San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grantee.

RUBÉN MARTÍNEZ, the son and grandson of immigrants from El Salvador and Mexico, is a writer, performer, and professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

 HÉCTOR TOBAR is a novelist and journalist, the author of four books, and the Los Angeles–born son of Guatemalan immigrants.