Mexican Literature
This page covers Mexican literature. McKee Library's collection includes numerous titles by Latin American authors. We have included a selection of these titles in our reading list, which is linked below. The resources below cover the general topic. However, more information is available if you search for individual authors by name in the databases.
- Mexican Literature Reading ListA Mexican literature reading list. This is not an exhaustive list, rather a list of titles available in McKee Library's collection.
Research and Reference
- Mexican American Literature: Archival CollectionTARO (Texas Archival Resources Online) contains finding aids with descriptions of the archival holdings of the Benson Latin American Collection. You can search for names of collections, subjects, specific materials or countries that are held in our rare books and manuscripts collection.
- Mexican Literature: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Mexican literature. This page includes reference materials and a concept map.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Lost Children Archive
NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * "An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood ... This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences." --The Washington Post One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years In Valeria Luiselli's fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family's crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained--or lost in the desert along the way. A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive--a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.
Como Agua para Chocolate
A #1 bestseller in Mexico in 1990, this charming, imaginative, and just plain fun novel of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico includes unique recipes at the beginning of each chapter for a variety of traditional dishes.
A History of Mexican Literature
A History of Mexican Literature chronicles a story more than five hundred years in the making, looking at the development of literary culture in Mexico from its indigenous beginnings to the twenty-first century. Featuring a comprehensive introduction that charts the development of a complex canon, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of Mexican literature. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse and fiction of such diverse writers as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mariano Azuela, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Octavio Paz. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism and multiculturalism in Mexican literature. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Mexican writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.
City of Kings
Written in 1960, these stories unfold in the Mexican state of Chiapas—the later site of the Zapatista uprising, and the author addresses controversial questions of power, class, race, and language, giving insight into the historical background of a political struggle still going on today. The complex relationship of conquerors and conquered is explored with masterful writing that earned Rosario Castellanos a permanent place in the literary history of Mexican authors.
Sea Monsters
Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating story of a teenage girl who trades her a middle-class upbringing for a quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is "a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments" (Los Angeles Review of Books). One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking―recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa's surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will "promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery." It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the "Beach of the Dead." Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Set to a pulsing soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us. "Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends meaning below every surface. Like Sebald's or Cusk's, her haunted writing patrols its own omissions . . . The figure of the shipwreck looms large for Aridjis. It becomes a useful lens through which to see this book, which is self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea." ―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
El Laberinto de la Soledad y Otras Obras
Octavio Paz has written one of the most enduring and powerful works ever created on Mexico and its people, character, and culture. Compared to Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses for its trenchant analysis, this collection contains Octavio Paz' most famous work, The Labyrinth of Solitude, a beautifully written and deeply felt discourse on Mexico's quest for identity that gives us an unequaled look at the country hidden behind the mask. Also included are Postscript, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, and Mexico and the United States, all of which develop the themes of the title essay and extend his penetrating commentary to the United States and Latin America.