foreign [Music] foreign [Music] hi I'm Heather Marie montia and you are watching PBS books thank you for joining us PBS books in collaboration with PBS SoCal is pleased to host a conversation with Pulitzer prize-winning author Hector Tobar author of our migrant Souls a meditation on race and the meanings and myth of Latino PBS books is proud to partner with the Library of Congress to promote their 2023 Library of Congress National Book Festival let's take a moment to hear from the librarian of Congress Dr Carla Hayden I'm Carla Hayden Library of Congress and I want to give a thank you to PBS folks for supporting the national Book Festival hope you can join us in Washington and online for this year's Festival on Saturday August the 12th well as Dr Hayden said the festival occurred on August 12th it was free and open to everyone this year they focused on the theme everyone has a story since then the Library of Congress has worked to prepare all of the festival conversations to be available to you representing the voices of nearly 80 outstanding authors go to loc.gov bookfest well for more than a month PBS books and PBS stations across the country have been hosting a series of 10 virtual events with 11 authors they are available online on PBS books and the national Book Festival website today's conversation features Hector Tobar to discuss his work and involvement in the festival his latest book are migrant Souls a meditation on race and the meaning in the midst of Latino explores the Latino experience and identity in the 21st century Latino is the most open-ended and Loosely defined of the major race categories in the U.S this book assembles Hector tobar's personal experiences as the son of a Guatemalan immigrant and the stories told to him by his latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people let's meet Hector Tobar Hector Tobar is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and novelist he's the author of The critically acclaimed bestseller deep down dark as well as the Barbarian nursery's translation nation and the tattooed Soldier Tobar is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California Irvine he has written for the New Yorker the LA Times and other Publications tobar's short fiction has appeared in the best American short stories Anthology series Los Angeles Noir slate and more he is a native of Los Angeles where he currently lives with his family his newest release which we're here today to discuss was featured at the 2023 National Book Festival it is my extraordinary honor to welcome Hector thank you so much for having me have you to moderate today's conversation it is my pleasure to introduce one of my favorite book people in public media Maria Hall Brown Marie Hall Brown is the senior director of PBS SoCal and she joined in June of 1997. she recently won a Telly Award and was nominated for an LA area award for the documentary film American voices the personal story of American Chorale composers and a broad look at the power of song she has also been involved in numerous other important documentaries for 16 years Maria worked as a producer reporter for the Nightly News program real orange the producer host of the author interview series bookmark and the producer host of the weekly program La art she has garnered two LA area Emmys and seven golden mic awards for her important work a proud graduate of the University of California Irvine she received a distinguished alumni award in 2005.

Maria is a passionate supporter of the Arts welcome Maria so great to be here thank you so much Heather I'm excited to talk to Hector oh I can't wait to hear your conversation so without further delay enjoy thank you wow I'm just thrilled to be with you Hector I mean obviously we just learned an enormous amount about your accolades your history your work and everything like that but you know interestingly enough the most important thing I learned from reading your book is that you know some things should not be assumed it's much better to get the full story because it's always a better story so we get a chance to get to know you a little bit more right now and I'm going to start with the whole idea is that you are a massive fan of words in fact a dictionary was one of your prize gifts from your father yes you know my father when I was fourth grade fifth grade wandered over to Pickwick books in Hollywood California and bought me the first expensive present I ever got which was the first edition of the American Heritage dictionary of the English language and I realized much later that my father um his own mother my grandmother was illiterate I didn't know this until I had written my fourth book many many years later and I realized that at that moment my father bought me a dictionary he was a person whose mother could not read a word in any language and he was giving me his son all the words in English so from an early age I thought I've been taught to treasure language to treasure public libraries to treasure books and I live in a house filled with books my kids grew up with books so yes I'm very much a word person I think that's why I think that the the title of this book is so profound and so on point because it's a meditation on race and the meanings and myths of Latinos and just even that word meditation that whole idea to ponder I'm sure you've been pondering this for a long time but what was the the impetus that had you put it down on paper for the rest of us to understand well I think that Latino people in the popular media tend to be the objects of a spectacle there's the spectacle of the of the fence and the border and these large groups of people in Caravans crossing the border um and and and there's you know also all of these stereotypes um invective against Latino immigrants and to me I wanted to stop and think about ourselves as Citizens uh in the full sense of the word all the meanings of the word citizen as people who are active in this country contribute to this country and who are shaping this country's future even as we speak I mean to me I think one of the great Untold Stories of the United States the United States that we live in today is that people of Latin American descent are really shaping the way this country feels the way it eats and the way it talks and the way it even thinks about itself as a country absolutely spot on and I think the other thing that I really enjoy about this and frankly I've read it twice and the reason I read it twice is because is because you get other people one that when you read it you too begin to wonder and to ponder and to want to go further into it um I mean just even etymology of words you talk about these words Latino latinx uh race you know the misnomer of what race is and and you know words that seem to be so scientific and yet they are completely falsehoods the word Caucasian you know that that end up just being shortcuts uh to try to explain something that does not necessarily explainable it's all these words that you have created um elaborate understanding for etymology is imperative in this and so you you start going through these pieces to understand things like the word Latino and Latin neck Texas is very much in the Forefront of is it really something that we've understand the definition of yeah you know we're we live in a country where so many people and so many so many people who tell stories are obsessed with these ideas these labels especially the race labels white and black Asian Latino is supposed to be an ethnic an ethnic label but people treat it like a race label and and to me they are just these simplistic definitions these things that don't really quite fit anybody and we all feel kind of awkward uh within them Latino is um an idea that surfaces as this idea of this alliance between people from all these different countries from Mexico from Puerto Rico Dominican Republic uh from South America we all have in common this Heritage of of being migrants and so this term Latino was invented to bring us together um but at the same time it doesn't really explain the complexity of of us it doesn't it doesn't explain that we're all these different colors that many of us have a very very strong powerful indigenous Heritage others of us are afro-latinos and we are you know we we identify very much with with Black Culture uh obviously there's a strong European current within the idea of being Latino because you know we have this Heritage that goes back to Spain um and so yes it's it's you know we we're all too complicated to really fit inside these labels and yet you know they're supposed to explain who we are um explain how we feel and that to me I see it causing a lot of of hurt within people a lot of confusion so the you know that the cross awareness and the cross understanding and the cross life I mean even the Immigrant experience you you there's another part that made me really Ponder and to think and to understand that trying to say that the Latino experience as an immigrant is is just singular and down one channel is a complete misnomer as well because you know the neighborhoods and the people and the influences and if you look at the geography of it we've got that all wrong as well oh absolutely uh you know I I in the book I described this journey I took across the United States uh 9 000 miles up and down the West Coast down to Texas uh South Florida all the way up to New York and then across the country again in Pennsylvania and all the places where you can find now people who can call themselves Latino and the variety of people is just so incredible from people who are of indigenous who really identify with an indigenous group in Rural Oregon to people who are Mormon and Mexican in Utah um to people who grew up on the border in El Paso and identify themselves as fronterisos as people of the Border you know people who've always gone back and forth uh to South Florida of course uh you know on the huge uh not just the Cuban population but a population from all over Latin America in in South Florida and then at land places like Atlanta which now to me when I go to Atlanta if you parts of it feel a lot like Los Angeles you know they've been very latinized and they're incredibly diverse and and part of their diversity is is this um sort of Spanish feel of many corners of Georgia and other parts of the South and finally all the way up to New York you know and and just the whole Caribbean Dominican Puerto Rican reggaeton feel of New York which is you know of course what I get done is all over the country but I grew up more with the ranchera kind of feel the trumpets and the big hats of Mexican-American Mariachi culture so you know even the music is just so widely varied and and um yes and it's it's great fun to sort of explore that and to think about what are the things that tie all these different kinds of people together speaking of Los Angeles passionate lover of Los Angeles Levitz it's quirkiness it's diversity it's it's vibrancy and you grew up in a really diverse neighborhood that you didn't even think about that there should have been any kind of issue with it whatsoever but it was it it really showcase so many different things right I think you know a lot of I think that is integration of many different kinds of people is something that still happens in lots of corners of the United States and I grew up in 1970s Los Angeles alongside people of Mexican heritage alongside many Filipino people the neighborhood where I grew up is now called little Armenia because um there are so many Armenian people in that neighborhood and also with Asian people lots of Eastern Europeans some of my best friends were from Czechoslovakia had another friend uh you know white kid from Arkansas whose dad had died in the Vietnam War you know we were all this sort of group of basketball players kids growing up together and yes I think that's the but I think that's the experience of a big chunk of America you know in one way or another we encounter all this cultural diversity and that's true even in lots of rural corners of the United States you know you go to small towns in Idaho Eastern Washington uh you even go to places in New England where there is increasing racial and cultural diversity and where you can find you know excellent enchiladas you know it's uh it's something that's become spread to most of the United States and with all this joy and all this Wonder there's also the issue of what you spoke about really early and that is um the unfortunate and needs to be adjusted changed and altered perception um of what it means to be Latino and what it means to have an immigrant experience and and how it's portrayed and one of the pieces you know of this very layer peeling book um is the victim or the criminal absolutely and and how that doesn't even come close to representing but how that's just become what's there what we see no absolutely uh you know um if you think about what's the job that most Latino male actors are likely to get the role they're most likely get is that of cartel operatives sicario as they you know called in Spanish uh and so that's the dominant vision of Latino people in uh in mainstream American film and television is that of uh you know the the the the soldier in the drug war or the the Kingpin and the drug war and so and which of course fits in with a certain rhetoric that you know appears in certain uh circles about uh Latino immigrants as this danger of people bringing in you know drugs into the country and the other the other dominant image in the liberal media is of this you know simple uneducated um very innocent uh immigrant who's helpless uh who is um confused by the complexity of the United States you know someone who has been victimized uh by cartels and gangs in their country or just victimized by poverty and it's this betrayal of us as this you know largely nameless yeah group of people who just you know struggling to live you know in the shadows which is my least favorite cliche about Latino people that they live in the shadows and and that dominates the image of Latino people in the in the liberal media and many sympathetic accounts right of trying to to uh you know reveal talk about the lives of Latino immigrants they paint this picture of us as as powerless and helpless people and that's just not my experience personally having interviewed hundreds of Latino immigrants thousands actually over the course of my career and being this child of immigrants who um were always just very assertive educated and confident people so what did you find on your 9 000 mile journey and you've put a lot in the book but I'm sure that there's a lot that you experienced that you didn't put in the book but what did it do for you and what did you what happened to you and who did you learn about and you know I learned a lot about and this might seem peculiar as an answer but I learned a lot about myself and I learned that there are little bits of myself all over this country and allow me to explain so I grew up you know with this Guatemalan immigrant parents my father really ambitious only had a sixth grade education in Guatemala comes to Los Angeles gets a high school equivalency and then two years of community college but always works in the service industry but a life long lover of books you know reads a book A Week my father usually Roman history is his favorite subject and you know and I thought of myself as this Oddball you know Guatemalan kid uh growing up in this family obsessed with books and obsessed with history and ideas but you know traveling across the United States I find people like that everywhere you know and all it takes is asking a few questions um spending some time in somebody's front yard or in their living room for them to open up about their dreams about their ideas you know I met an artist in Salt Lake City who who paints uh these beautiful portraits of Latino people in Utah I met a construction worker in Atlanta who was a poet at heart and wrote poetry was very proud of the fact he told me that he had never struck his children you know because he grew up with so many people who used uh corporal punishment and he and he did not because he was he was trying to communicate to me that he was a thoughtful person you know I I wandered into el barrio in New York and I you know I didn't have much time to be interviewing people because I'm driving from place to place the first person that I started to talk to on you know on one of these street corners in alvario was this 50-something uh utility worker who just knew everything about Puerto Rican history in New York about the radicals of the 60s you know about the young Lords and all the Arts Movement and and it was just he was just giving me the lay of the land of where I was standing you know where you told me where you're standing in sacred ground to the Puerto Rican people because we have fought and struggled here so everywhere you go in the United States you can find a Latino person who's thoughtful about his community who um loves his community who loves the United States as this place of opportunity as a place where they've allowed been allowed to express arrest themselves aloud to reach um the full expression of their intelligence you know or have kids who are doing that so you know to travel across the United States and and you know I I had this idea of Idaho and Utah and Tennessee as places that were not like where I grew up but more and more they are like where I grew up I think that was the thing that I that I that was most impactful to me sounds joyous but along with all of that Joy there's enormous amount of pain earn people painful stories as well and also the the pain that was incurred prior to them coming to the United States the pain that the United States is incurred upon them um and just trying to create them uh an awareness and an understanding to make themselves whole again so there's there's pain in what we have done to our immigrant brethren well it's also just the pain of Separation you know I think um a lot of people I think the verb forced to migrate really kind of covers up a lot about the Immigrant experience because I think that most people who migrate choose to migrate they're taking a risk they tend to be gamblers you know they tend to be people who are you know going to embrace this chance that they have even though it's increasingly risky and so to so for a lot of established Latino families um the pain is that you have this border Crosser in your past uh or maybe he's your parent he lives with you and you have the pain of his separation from his family from his roots and that's that causes a Nostalgia and of course it's the subject of of so many different songs and so much you know so much cultural production right um and that's part of it uh then there's also just the hurt caused by all this stereotypes and all the ugly you know these ugly ideas about people who are called Latino these ideas that were not very smart I mean that to me is the most hurtful one and that's the one that I think we all feel um the most we feel this sense that we cannot be intellectual actors you know that we're not uh we're not ambitious intellectually you know um that colors the way high school counselors talk to their students it colors um the way we're portrayed in commercials the kinds of commercials that we appear in and so that to me is something that every every Latino kid growing up in this country feels that they feel this stigma of the other you know being seen as the other and the way that people see us and that to me is the is I've spent a whole career trying to overcome that you know doing somersaults publishing books to show people look I'm smart you know I'm not I'm not this stereotype of who you think we are and that's again another piece of this is the history of how all of that came into being and how all of that was established I mean learning about the Frontier Thesis I actually started thinking about you know public education and what did that mean in public education was designed literally to make Americans out of immigrants to make sure that their civil uh Behavior was in a certain way and their language is a certain way I mean you got me pondering in all these different directions but the history of Hello this happened is incredibly eye-opening the limitations on immigration and and the changes in the laws and the verbiage and everything um a remarkable amount of research something that you had known and found a spot for or something that you pursued in trying to tie all of these threads of these stories together well you know I've been a history buff ever since I was seven years old because my father was going to Community College when I was seven years old he was going to get his AAA degree and he brought home uh and I still have it uh he brought home this really thick American history textbook 1970s American history College textbook and it had all of American history in there and it was like oh my God it was just I just I just loved reading about the American Revolution and the Civil War and the battles of the Civil War and all the amendments and um and yes so I that's a whole this book reflects a whole lifetime of being essentially a history geek but we're not generally speaking Latino people aren't inside that history and so my work 25 years as a journalist 25 years of writing about Latino communities I have learned a lot about the way in which our story uh is braided in with this American history that I learned about uh in school and in college you know Latino history uh is part now of this country's history and but we're not we're not really told it and we're also not told much about the history that we bring with us from other countries you know I think the average American kid knows very little about the Mexican Revolution almost nothing about the Salvadoran revolution in Civil War which is one of the great events of the 20th century this you know improvised Army of peasants facing off this Army um you know equipped by the United States you know all these events of Latin American history are unknown to us and yet there are literally you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids who bring this history with them into American neighborhoods they bring the memories of the Salvadoran Revolution the legacy of the Mexican Revolution is alive so much in Southern California and other places right um and and the other part of it is that you know the the United the United States history is really interesting as the way it forms ideas about race right the idea of white and black is created in American history to explain slavery you know we now know that race is um and absolutely non-scientific idea there's no basis in science um and yet we think of it as this scientific category that to which we belong but in fact it's just a myth that was created to explain slavery Asian is a category created to explain where Chinese and Japanese migrants fit in the social fabric of the the United States and Latino is this idea that exists to explain where all these migrants fit in the race scheme you know in the structure of the United States how we're part of this American story um so to me untangling that and finding out that you know we're part of this as you say this longer history of migration and xenophobia and pushing people away working them in taking their labor but also trying to limit how many of them there are that same thing happened to the Italians the same thing happened to the Jews the same thing happened to the Chinese and so forth and so on so much to talk about um just wanted I wanted to let everyone know I'm Maria Hall Brown from PBS SoCal and you are watching PBS books in celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival I'm here with Pulitzer prize-winning author Hector Tobar we're discussing his latest book our migrant Souls a meditation on race and the meaning and myths of Latino all right Hector one of the things that uh you made me think of when you were expressing all of these histories that are not part of the vernacular that need to be they're they're rolling out but they're being rolled out in very um limited channels and separately and you have something in your book which just illuminated it so viscerally it's like having an individual orchestral performer go out and play his instrument alone and have each run of those uh performers come out and play and yet you're missing the beauty of the entire production um right is it slightly changing are we are we moving in any good direction to mold these stories together and to make these stories part of everyone's story yes I I think that increasingly if you look at the work of American historians there is a lot of work being done on how different groups have interacted with each other in American cities throughout American history you know I remember the first time uh that I became aware of just how long the United States has been really racially diverse and how long people have caught you know worked alongside each other and lived alongside each other when I read this wonderful history of New York City called Gotham which describes how poor white indentured servants and blacks lived alongside one another in Manhattan in New York uh you know in the as far back as the 17th century you know and there were these fears of poor whites and and blacks working together to start a revolution or an uprising in New York City you know back in the 17th century and now today we have Scholars like the wonderful George Sanchez who's written a history of one Los Angeles neighborhood called boil Heights in East Los Angeles a neighborhood originally settled in large numbers by Jewish migrants from the Eastern United States and from other part from other parts of the world who came to uh to Boyle Heights to create a Jewish Community but at the same time alongside people of Italian descent Mexican descent many many Japanese and African-American members of that Community also and so yes as like I say it's like you know we have in most American cities you have people of many different backgrounds living alongside one another and so why do we tell their history separately why do we have you know just tell Africa you know it's important to do that it's important to understand African-American history has these Traditions but there's also this history of cooperation and interaction that takes place and and definitely Latinos are very much a part of that going back in history um you know there is this myth or however you a story of priding ourselves of welcoming um all kinds of diverse populations from around the world for a number of reasons um and yet it seems as time has progressed we've become numb to the atrocities of other places the heartache of others and um even what has happened in our own country you you bring up some things about memorializing um where tragedies have taken place um the Walmart that you went to in which there's uh you know in Texas where you know so many people lost their lives and yet life goes on um is our numbing of humanity altering our interest or our energy or our veracity in in making change well I think this process of feeling numb actually serves a very um negative social function so by being numb about oh there's like so much violence and so many people dying at the border and you know it's a way in a way of accepting it you know of saying that of accepting the normality of it uh and not and not embracing this idea that we should fight against the inequality uh the the attitudes that produce that kind of violence right um so you know we have we and it also what it does is it it creates this lie that we're not interdependent on one another so thousands of people attempt to cross the Sonoran Desert hundreds die every every summer if not thousands the true number is is not known as the work of Jason DeLeon this one Anthropologist who I quote in the book uh his work has shown that we we probably are are severely under count under counting how many people are die crossing the border every year but those those people trying to reach the United States they're trying to do work here they're doing work um that Latino people do because this country is dependent on their labor their low paid labor so the wealth and comfort that we feel as Americans in this country depends on the labor of people who have this violence hovering over them the violence of the border right of having to cross um not just the barriers of the Border but also facing all of these criminal gangs that now have monetized uh the crossing of the border right taking advantage of these barriers to to um you know take money from people and to torture them and and uh you know as they're Crossing um so our comfort you know the order of your average American suburb you go to a suburb of Los Angeles like San Dimas right or Claremont these really places where you find these beautifully manicured Lawns well Latino labor is doing that and very often it's the labor of people who have undocumented members in their family right uh people who are accepting lower wages um because that's you know because they have this immigration status hovering over them so our comfort our the ease of Our Lives is dependent on the labor of people who have to risk their lives or face death even trying to go back and reach their families in Latin America so absolutely I think that the numbness is is something that serves as a way to forget and try to erase that relationship that we have with one another and yet there is hope on the horizon to a certain degree I hope because um you recently spoke to the graduating class of the University of California Irvine humanities and you call them superheroes because they have super powers and you work as a teacher you hear stories you understand so are there enough superheroes with superpowers in our future to switch this narrative around and to reignite our nerve endings so that we're not numb and to rewrite these stories so that they're not singular and to stand up and fight again for the the humanity of us all yes well um yes I did deliver this speech and I called the the graduating class of 2023 there at the UC Irvine I call them uh superheroes I told them they're super power is one that I learned when I was in college which is called critical thinking because because critical thinking gives you like an x-ray vision you know you see things apparently in one way and you adopt this tool of critical thinking you study history you study social relations and you understand truths that are not obvious to everyone so you as an educated person get to see them and it's your job to teach others uh you know what's really happening so to me uh this country with its excellent still excellent public education system especially in a state like California that has a wonderful community and still affordable community college system that allows gives people Second Chances you know you can you can be a terrible high school student uh you know go work uh in fast food for a couple of years and then transition into Community College and and start a career in your in your late 20s or early 30s so this country has an incredible public education system an incredible Public Library System you know most countries in many countries of the world there is no such thing as a public library where you can go and check out books like I did when I was growing up in Hollywood so all of that creates um it helps to create uh Warriors and thinkers um Future Leaders uh future prophets and uh you know priests and uh and all kinds of different people who are going to uh change this country and give us a new vision of where it might go absolutely so you didn't start out as a writer or do they not start out to intend to be a writer as much as you love words and books and everything you are going to be a doctor that's right you know you know a lot about me that's kind of yeah I was a pre-med student when I went off to college I was 17 when I went to college and I had this idea that I wanted to do good and my father said that there were two possible professions that I could follow one was either being a lawyer or being a doctor and he preferred that I try to be a doctor because he didn't like lawyers very much sorry to the member of the legal profession out there many of whom are my friends uh you know I so I went as a pre-med student and I also I had no even though my I grew up in a family with books and you know a father who read voraciously I did not know that I could become a writer it was like I didn't know that was a profession it wasn't anything that I'd ever been exposed to I remember the first time that I saw a a writer read in public it was at a bookstore in San Francisco and by then I was like 22 or 23 years old uh I was the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman who had come to San Francisco to speak about his books I had never seen a writer before in person like that and in you know I started working at a community newspaper and then I became a professional writer making nine dollars an hour um and getting to tell stories and also trying to make up for the fact that there weren't many stories about Latino people or Latino journalists working in the profession back then when I started in the in the late 1980s there were some but there weren't nearly enough to cover these burgeoning communities and so I I started by telling stories about Latino immigrants but also just doing investigative reporting about homelessness and the mentally ill and all sorts of other subjects and so yeah I became a writer by accident really um I wandered into a Mexican bread store saw a stack of free newspapers one of the newspapers said we need volunteers and that became my that became my job um so but now my next thought is that you did not become a doctor but you have changed lives I mean you've been part of the Library of Congress Festival of books you have uh obviously working for the LA Times got Pulitzer in being part of the team for the 1992 LA riots your books have been your book has been made into a feature film um you now have this book that I believe should be required reading for all students um and you were teaching so do you ever step back and think I didn't become a doctor but I am making people's lives better I really love being a Storyteller whether that be in a book uh in a book that will go on the Shelf of a public library or a bookstore or hopefully in somebody's home like my own bookshelf which is filled with the books of other people um or you know being a Storyteller to a lecture hall uh you know I teach I teach classes in literary journalism in English and Chicano Latino culture at UC Irvine and a lot of it is just putting on a performance and telling a story about uh about Chicano Latino theater or um you know a Chicano Latino novel and and just you know and just passing on what I've learned during a lifetime of of reading a lifetime spent in libraries and uh on my couch uh devouring books and being lucky enough to write them and hoping to pass on Hope pass on whatever knowledge I have knowledge of The Craft of writing to new generations of writers that's a lot of what I do also um because it's a really wonderful craft it's very powerful one to be able to put your ideas into words I grew up watching so much great public television that shaped my reading habits also um everything from you know I Claudius uh to Nova and so many great great programs over the years that really enriched my life so just trying to give a little bit back that's all well um I know you've said that people read for information and people read for curiosity but I'm going to quote something to you that is another writer William Nicholson when giving life to C.S Lewis uh in the film shadowlands said we read to know we are not alone and I think that that is what you have very clearly done oh thank you so much that's you know my my ideal reader is someone who's really curious about Latino people maybe wants to figure out more about his Latino or her Latino neighbors but also that Latino kid who thinks you know wow how do we how does our story fit in you know I have all kinds of crazy people in there I have assassins in my book the Donner Party is there the famous Donner party and the poor Mexican Teamster who got uh you know got um lost his life in the in the Donner Party Crossing Sierras there's all kinds of character Frida Kahlo is is in the book too um so it's it's a I tried to make it something that that people would want to turn the page and keep on reading so uh thank you so much for all the kind words you've said about it well read twice maybe three times I really want to thank you and I think we also need to thank Dr Seuss because I know he was a big influence on you um yes absolutely I I I I yeah that was my the first book I can remember my parents buying for me was Dr Seuss A to Z and I remember the moment in which my uh my kindergarten teacher at Grant Elementary School in East Hollywood California told my mother Mrs Webb my Elementary School kindergarten teacher told my mother you know you should you need to buy this by this kid a book He's already pretty smart buy him a book and here's the here's a book you could buy him and and you know my parents ended up buying that book for me and uh yeah it was the beginning of a lifelong love of reading well thank you that inspired this wonderful writer so I want to thank you very very much for spending this uh wonderful time with me and all of the viewers that have enjoyed the opportunity to get to know you better and um I'm just privileged to have had this moment in time and I hope that I have the opportunity to meet you in person soon well thank you so much for the wonderful interview and for being such a careful and thoughtful reader of my book I'm honored and privileged I don't know and I do want to invite back at this time uh Heather Marie monteo who is going to kind of put a bow on all of this wonderful wonderfulness that we've had well thank you Maria thank you for your thoughtful questions and Hector thank you so much for your insights for your important work and for your superpowers both writing and critical thinking um and for helping us to learn more about the meaning and myths of Latino in many ways this conversation epitomizes the 2023 National Book festival's theme everyone has a story so thank you both for having this happen we appreciate it this year as we celebrate the Library of Congress National Book Festival I also wanted to share that for the first time in history the library of congress's poet laureate and the youth Ambassador for literature are both Latinas Ada Limon and Meg Medina respectively so as we think about the story that we will continue to be told I believe also that a new story is being written well as you all know I like to thank our library Partners more than 1800 strong across the country as well as numerous PBS stations especially PBS SoCal for joining us and sharing this important content with all of you most importantly we'd like to thank you for being here just a reminder that the Library of Congress National Book Festival content is now available you can go to loc.gov book Fest and another reminder that PBS books and conversations are now available there will be one more tomorrow evening but they're now available at PBS books and the library book Festival website well we've really enjoyed being able to share this conversation with all of you until next time I'm Heather Marie montia and happy reading [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause]