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Héctor Tobar

Biography

Héctor Tobar

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller DEEP DOWN DARK, as well as THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES, TRANSLATION NATION and THE TATTOOED SOLDIER. Héctor is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He's written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, Zyzzyva and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.

Héctor Tobar

Books by Héctor Tobar

by Héctor Tobar - Nonfiction, Social Sciences

"Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. OUR MIGRANT SOULS assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. It decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about "illegals" and have faced insults, harassment and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation.

by Héctor Tobar - Biography, Nonfiction

When the San José mine collapsed outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped 33 miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking 69 days. The entire world watched what transpired above-ground during the grueling and protracted rescue, but the saga of the miners' experiences below the Earth's surface --- and the lives that led them there --- has never been heard until now.

by Héctor Tobar

Héctor Tobar takes us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams and ambitions.