El País: A Latino journalist digs into communal experience, and his own
Héctor Tobar, Latino, Angeleno and American, plumbs a turbulent, complicated relationship in ‘Our Migrant Souls’
By Luis Pablo Beauregard | El País
Los Angeles, June 15 — With a long journalistic career, five books and a Pulitzer Prize behind him, Héctor Tobar’s latest project began with a simple question: what does it mean to be Latino in the United States? It was not the first time that the Los Angeles-born writer explored the identity process in a country as racialized as the U.S. He first did so in Translation Nation (2005), in which he explored the territory of Spanglish, that intangible nation made up of 35 million Spanish speakers in North America.
Tobar, 64, revisits the subject in Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”, in which he examines decades of thought on the subject from an angle that is both ambitious and personal. A professor at the University of California, Irvine, the writer describes what he calls the “Latino experience” which, in his case, began with his father’s departure from Guatemala after the U.S.-backed 1954 military coup that ousted President Jacobo Árbenz. Tobar retraces his father’s journey, visiting his family’s village, where he was able to piece together his family tree for the first time. …
