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National Hispanic Heritage Month

AADL celebrates National Hispanic Heritage Month with videos, quotes, and staff picks for adults and kids.

AADL Videos

Poetry Reading and Q&A with Nen G Ramirez
Author of All Women Are Born Wailing, Nen G Ramirez joined AADL for a night of poetry and conversation. Nen G Ramirez is a Chicanx writer from Adrian, Michigan. They are an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota whose work has appeared in Acentos Review, Split Lip Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and more.

Culinary Historians: Puerto Rican Cuisine
Most Americans know very little about Puerto Rican cuisine, partly because Puerto Ricans are but one segment of a vast population known as Latinos or Hispanics, a group that includes people of diverse racial, social and economic backgrounds, from Mexico to Cuba to South America.

Puerto Ricans hail from the Caribbean; thus their cuisine is a potpourri of various cultures, particularly Spanish, native Caribbean and African. It’s heavy on spices, though native “Nuyorican” cuisine has become milder over time due to mainland American influence.

“Nuyorican” refers to Puerto Ricans who were born or raised in New York City, which is where the majority of people of Puerto Rican heritage living in the U.S. are found. With 3.1 million Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico and nearly twice as many living in the United States, it’s no surprise that Nuyorican cooking has been distinctly influenced by American culture.

Puerto Rican cooking features warmth, sensuality; it is infinitely adaptable as countless Puerto Rican families have discovered over the years while living in northern climes.

Our speaker, Oswald Rivera, was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and grew up in Spanish Harlem in New York City. He is the author of "Puerto Rican Cuisine in America: Nuyorican and Bodega Recipes," as well as two other books on culinary history, "Feasting with the Ancestors" and "The Pharaoh's Feast."

Culinary Historians: Mexico's Early Cookbooks
Maite Gómez-Rejón of ArtBites explores early Mexican recipes! Read between the lines of colonial kitchen manuscripts, the first printed cookbooks post Independence through the Revolution in the early 20th century. Discover the shifting attitudes toward food, from a status marker and divider of classes to a tool for unifying the country and creating a unique national identity.

Maite Gómez-Rejón is the founder of ArtBites. She has dedicated her career to exploring the nexus of art and culinary history through lectures, cooking classes, and tastings presented in museums and universities across the country and through videos on her YouTube channel – ArtBites: Cooking Art History. Maite has a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Grande Diplome from the French Culinary Institute in New York City. She has been a guest on the Today Show, featured in Food & Wine magazine and Hyperallergic, and interviewed on KCRW's Good Food, NPR's Splendid Table and the BBC’s The Food Programme. She is also a contributor to Life & Thyme, Eaten Magazine, Gastro Obscura and other publications. Her essay “Mexico's Early Cookbooks” appears in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History.

The Big Gay Read 2021: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
AADL staff discussed the 2021 Big Gay Read, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by award-winning author Benjamin Alire Sáenz.

Author Spotlight: Carolina De Robertis
Lucy shines the spotlight on the works of Carolina De Robertis. A writer of Uruguayan origins, Carolina De Robertis is the author of five novels and has been awarded the Stonewall Prize for two of these. She has also been a finalist for the for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, as well as the Kirkus Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Her books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2022, she is an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, gathering oral histories of queer and trans BIPOC elders in collaboration with Baldwin for the Arts and the Center for Oral History at Columbia University. She is an associate professor at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland, California, with her wife and two children.

Biblio Files: Books by Latine Authors
AADL staff members talk about their favorite Latine authors in this episode of Biblio Files.

Santiago's Road Home by Alexandra Diaz
Lucy reads the first chapter of Sanitago's Road Home in this episode of First Chapter Friday. Santiago's Road Home is a middle grade title recommended for ages 10 and up.