-
2 months ago | 
latinousa.org | Reynaldo Leanos Jr. |Luis Eduardo Luna |Marie Arana
“Latinos are not a monolith” is something that we hear almost every election cycle when politicians try to understand and court Latino voters. But arguably no one knows the nuances and realities of this community more than Peruvian-American journalist and author Marie Arana. She recently wrote “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” which explores the complexities, histories and culture of Latinos in the United States.
-
Aug 20, 2024 | 
foreignaffairs.com | Alan Norton |Alan Taylor |Richard Feinberg |Marie Arana
In This Review In This Review American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873In his spirited narrative, Taylor shows how the destinies of the three North American powers—Canada, Mexico, and the United States—became forever intertwined. In the nineteenth century, the doctrines of aristocratic hierarchy, republican liberalism, and indigenous communalism battled for hegemony throughout North America.
-
Aug 20, 2024 | 
foreignaffairs.com | Marie Simon |Marie Arana |Richard Feinberg |Alan Taylor
In This Review In This Review LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood MinorityLatinoLand is a sweeping, celebratory history of the diverse Latino contributions to American life. Arana begins with a terrifyingly bleak assessment of the genocidal racism of the early Spanish conquistadors and the biased colorism that continues to plague the Western Hemisphere.
-
Mar 18, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Marie Arana
History is being made on the Rio Grande. Hundreds of thousands of migrants braved the journey across it last year, setting records and contributing to an urgent border crisis. As spectacle, it has been transfixing. Yet misconceptions abound. It's as if the sight of a migrant scaling a wall or wading ashore is now a Rorschach test, our Rashomon.
-
Mar 14, 2024 | 
thefp.com | Marie Arana
It’s a difficult line to tread not disparaging different Protestant denominations, including politely ignoring the ones that have heretical and antithetical beliefs to RC Christianity, but I cannot get behind Pentacostalism. On the one hand, it’s beautiful to see people on fire for their faith and so involved in building up different ministries to serve the needs of their community where social/government services fail or just aren’t able to meet the amount of demand.
-
Mar 13, 2024 | 
thefp.com | Marie Arana
In recent years, Latino voters have confounded expectations. Long taken for granted as a solidly Democratic voting bloc, they are now shifting rightward, with one recent poll showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden among Latino voters. But voting preferences are just one area where this cohort is misunderstood. Another is religion. Latinos, who make up 20 percent of the U.S. population, aren’t homogeneously Catholic.
-
Feb 13, 2024 | 
almendron.com | Marie Arana
Is there such a thing as “the Latino voter”? My father, a Peruvian, was something of a Republican, even when he wasn’t yet a citizen of the United States. For the first 15 years of my parents’ marriage, in Peru, he was mostly concerned with the careening allegiances of his own countrymen: the gaping divide between the elites and the poor; the wild, destabilizing vacillation between right wing and left wing in Latin America; the perpetual pendulum swing between oppression and revolution.
-
Feb 13, 2024 | 
washingtonpost.com | Marie Arana
It took many more years before he became a citizen, but once he did, he voted a Republican slate for the rest of his life. My mother broke ranks to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, by which time my father had decamped this mortal coil. I, on the other hand, had left the ranks of Republicans as a child, in that heartbreak year of 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated.
-
Nov 3, 2023 | 
electricliterature.com | Marie Arana |Paula Ramon |Paula Ramón
Reading Lists Paula Ramón, author of "Motherland," recommends literature about the past and present of her home country Venezuela, my home country, was once one of the richest countries in Latin America due to the discovery of oil at the start of the last century. Today, Venezuela is in political and economic turmoil with a mass exodus of more than 7 million. As I wrote my new memoir, Motherland about the fragile concept of home and my complicated relationship to my family and to Venezuela,...
-
Nov 3, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Marie Arana |David Grann |Alok Vaid-Menon
Arana has a fascinating, complex, and personal story to tell, and she narrates it with abundant verve and intelligence. An impressively wide-ranging overview of the turbulent history of Latine people in America. Arana, the inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress, has always been ambitious in her work, from American Chica to Bolivar to Lima Nights.
