2025: Book by a Mexican or Central or South American author
Book recommendations/suggestions for the Read, Seed, Water, Feed 2025 book challenge. Find your next book!
read, seed, water, feed book challenge - about prompt support posts
about prompt support posts
All of the prompt support posts (those that begin with "2025: Book written by...", for example) are organized similar to each other.
Each of these posts was created to support the Read, Seed, Water Feed book challenge on Storygraph that I am hosting. They were also created to support learning outside of the university, collective educational efforts, finding new authors to read, finding books, and more.
For each book challenge prompt, I will share the following sections:
- one or more slides with books I have read or am currently reading that I recommend for the prompt
- a list of additional books from my TBR (to-be-read) list for the prompt
- a text listing of the books that I shared in the slides
I might share one or more of the following in addition, depending on capacity and other factors:
- other supportive text as appropriate, such as countries included
- some quotes, notes, and/or reflections about one or more of the books
- links to other posts on the site where I discuss the books or prompt in more detail
I did many things to minimize hierarchy within these posts, and there will still be some things that might feel odd, such as split galleries of slides, which was a choice made to address current limitations in how the galleries work.
If interested, find bingo cards, more background on the prompts, and other reflections, on the Reading Challenge page and if on Storygraph, join the challenge.
Mostly, my goal for prompt support posts is to share books for each prompt, as suggestions and as examples. This section will be first on every post and may be skipped.
Thank you for reading.
Recommended Books
Books I've read or am currently reading that I recommend for this prompt.
Read, Seed, Water, Feed 2025 reading challenge prompt and description, showing books recommended that I have read or am currently reading. All recommended books are listed lower in the post in the section “Recommended Books in a List.”
More Books from my TBR List
For some prompts, I’m trying to diversify what I read; for others, deepening my knowledge while also growing my perspective. For some prompts, there are definitely more books on my to-be-read (TBR) list than the ones I share that I have read or am currently reading. Here are some of those books:
Nonfiction
- Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (2005, rev. 2016) by Dana Frank
- The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families (2015) by Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman
- Decolonial Marxism (2022) by Walter Rodney
- The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (2023) edited by Christen A. Smith, Bethânia Gomes, and Archie Davies
- Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery (2022) by Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman
Memoirs
- I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983) by Rigoberta Menchú, translated by Ann Wright and Elizabeth Burgos
- Solito (2022) by Javier Zamora
Fiction
- Monstrilio (2023) by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
- Off-White (2019) by Astrid H. Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott and David McKay
- The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) by Machado de Assis, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
- Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology (2021) edited by Alex Hernandez, Matthew David Goodwin, and Sarah Rafael García.
- You Dreamed of Empires (2022) by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer
- Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World (2022) by Subcomandante Marcos, translation, introduction, and commentaries by Lightning Collective
Young adult
- The Grief Keeper (2019) by Alexandra Villasante
Further notes
Authors in the diaspora are included. The book can be fiction or nonfiction.
Countries: Mexico / Countries of Central America: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama / Countries and territories of South America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the internal territory French Guiana.
(The countries of Belize, Guyana, and Suriname are also considered part of the Caribbean region and are included in that prompt as well).
Recommended Books in a List
As a list, books I've read or am currently reading that I recommend for this prompt:
Nonfiction
The Groundings with My Brothers (1971) by Walter Rodney
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) by Walter Rodney
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) by Paulo Freire
The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye (2020) by Andaiye, Alissa Trotz
Set Fear on Fire: The Feminist Call That Set the Americas Ablaze (2021) by LasTesis
Fiction
Crooked Plow (2019) by Itamar Vieira Junior
January (1958) by Sara Gallardo
The Vortex (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera
Get any/all of these books wherever you get your books.
Please support libraries however you can. Find out many ways to get involved in supporting libraries at Libraries for the People.
Please consider purchasing books when they are available from Workshops 4 Gaza's bookstore. When I share books that are available for purchase there at the time of posting, I will list them here after the link.
Thank you for reading.
