Billiken Bookmarks: Summer Reading Picks From SLU Authors

Tell Me How It Ends, by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House Press, 2017)

The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown & Co., 2018)

Tell Me How It Ends is the non-fictional chronicle of the stories of children who come here in a most dangerous journey, captured in their words by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, while serving as their court translator in New York City.

This brief book is structured by 40 questions the court asks of these children, ending as a call to action prompted by the author's daughter's repeated request to "tell her how the stories end."

The House of Broken Angels is a semi-autobiographical novel by Luis Alberto Urrea, on a Mexican-American family who has lived in California for decades, setting down roots.  Their deep cultural ties come forth as the family patriarch is dying, through the witness and presence of a family "outsider," Little Angel. 

The tone is humorous, but poignant; the book gathers strength over its course, in the crescendo to Big Angel's end.

Luiselli and Urrea come at the topic of identity and displacement from very different genres and angles. Through their skill as writers, and the compelling nature of their topic, both convey tenderness towards their subjects and to their readers, allowing us to deeply feel the experience of living between cultures, in the third space that is neither the country of origin or destination.

Masterly writing on timely experiences.  Particularly timely now because of the hot-button topic of migration in the Americas and US demographics.  Since 2015, the US has been the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world (after Mexico), with over 40 million, age 5 and older, who speak Spanish at home... not to mention over 11 million bilinguals. This is a 133.4 percent increase since 1990.  Hispanics constitute the United States' largest (and fastest-growing) ethnic or racial minority, currently close to 20 percent of the nation’s total population, and expected to be at 30 percent by 2060.

 Several of my courses deal with migration of Spanish-speaking populations into the US as depicted in literature and film.  I have also volunteered in a highly trafficked migrant shelter on Mexico's southern border where I witnessed first-hand the dangers and the desperation of the journey north.

Amy E. Wright, Ph.D., is associate professor and director of Spanish Graduate Studies at SLU.

She and her family are enjoying many wonderful moments these days with their nine-month-old son, and Wright am finishing a book manuscript on serialized storytelling in Mexico.  She have written on the origins of the novel in Mexico (Vanderbilt UP), the role of print culture in nation building (Cambridge UP), and is currently working with radio dramas, comic strips and soap operas as popular forms of storytelling.