In 1988, poet, journalist and activist Demetria Martinez was indicted on charges of conspiracy for helping Salvadorans escape their country. After she was acquitted, she began writing Mother Tongue. The result is the powerful story of a young woman's efforts to help a people who were routinely "disappeared" by their government. A nameless El Salvadoran man, fleeing torture and imprisonment, arrives in the United States-his only hope for asylum. The...

Nineteen-year-old Mary, longing for something meaningful in her life, agrees to help José Luis, a refugee from El Salvador who has been smuggled into the United States as part of a sanctuary movement, and immediately falls in love with both the movement and the man.

When Grandpa Luis's grandchildren are visiting him in Chimayo, New Mexico, they see pictures of animals in one of the tortillas he has cooked for their breakfast.

Includes the work of 201 Latino writers from the Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American traditions, as well as from the traditions of other Spanish-speaking countries. It traces five centuries of writing, from letters to the Spanish crown by sixteenth-century conquistadors to the cutting-edge expressions of twenty-first-century cartoonistas and artists of reggaetón.