Hector Tobar
@TobarWriter
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Author of Our Migrant Souls (MCD/FSG) and 5 more books, including The Tattooed Soldier, Deep Down Dark. Guggenheim Fellow. UC Irvine prof. Dad. IG: tobarhector
Los Angeles
Joined September 2011
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I've been writing books long enough to remember a time when there were only a handful of Latinx reviewers. That's changed. Dramatically. Huge thanks to
@_franciscocantu
for his thoughtful, beautiful review of my book Our Migrant Souls in
@nytimesbooks
.
“Tobar is unpreoccupied with settling on a fixed definition of ‘Latino.’ Instead, like a sculptor chipping away at a mass of stone, he is interested in revealing a human shape within it.” Read our review of Héctor Tobar’s “Our Migrant Souls.”
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I've been named a Guggenheim Fellow. In Fiction. This wonderful honor comes 30 years and 6 books after I first quit my job at the LA Times to write novels. Good things come to those persevere. My project: a series of novellas about LA's history and future.
#guggfellows2023
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For the 30 yrs. I've been writing about Latino issues, I've been subjected to constant 'vitriol' and ethnic hatred from 'readers.' (As have most Latinx writers). Not once has any institution I worked for stepped forward to defend me against racism
#DignidadLiteraria
#AmericanDirt
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I've been promoted to full Professor at UC Irvine. The structure of academia is essentially medieval--which explains the funny costumes at graduation. And much of its inner workings remain a mystery to me. But I do know I'll be getting new business cards.
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Today, in honor of Labor Day, I would like to tell you what I learned about class struggle--and U.S. literature--after reading 150 novels and story collections, as a member of the 2023 Pulitzer jury for fiction. 1/8
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My latest
@nytopinion
piece on how Hollywood's flood of drug-cartel movies and TV shows are spreading a dark vision of Latinos and lending support to Trump's anti-immigrant agenda.
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I'm deeply honored (and still a little in shock) to announce that I've been named a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard for 2020-21. I'll be working on a nonfiction book on Latinx resilience and identity in the nativist era. Thank you
@RadInstitute
!
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I sold a novel! It’s a multinational epic about family, war, and revolution. I’ve signed the contract, and today the LA sky looks bluer, and the breeze tastes less smoggy. All this a mere decade after I first had the idea, and after 4+ years of work. 🎉
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Yesterday I was in Paris. Today I'm in an L.A. waiting room watching a "stolen semi-truck pursuit" on TV. Ah, America.
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So, the Trump Administration just announced that 200,000 Salvadorans who've lived and worked and paid taxes in the U.S. for more than 15 years will now have to leave. My reaction: Make every word I write count. Fight to defend the humanity of my people. We'll win in the end.
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Diego Maradona is dead. My obituary of "the mop-haired boy from a Buenos Aires slum," which I wrote when I was the LA Times Buenos Aires bureau chief, is now up on
@latimes
. The great soccer writer Kevin Baxter
@kbaxter11
helped to update it.
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I'm deeply honored to join so many great writers as a finalist for The Kirkus Prize, for my book "Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of 'Latino'"
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I think that we Latino writers, especially, should peer into the questions of social class at the root of our “identity.” We should write about our relationship to "white" ideas of success and stauts. A lot of our bravest writers do this. Onward and upward with the arts! 8/8
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The good people
@nytimesbooks
asked me to write a Read Your Way Around the World feature about my hometown, Los Angeles. It was truly an honor to be asked, and I gave it my all. Happy to celebrate so many writers who've brought joy to my reading life.
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I’m looking forward to literary art that peers into the soul of a country defined by its growing income inequalities. Art that reveals the essential emptiness and unsustainability of a middle-and-upper class life focused on consumerism and the acquisition of social status. 5/8
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After reading 150 books, it’s clear to me that the white cultural elite (being a published writer makes you part of the elite) can’t imagine working-class status and poverty as anything else but tragedy. “Poor” white people in the novels I read are sad, broken, failed people. 2/8
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How do we become aware, when we are young, that racism and racists exist? I tackle this question in my new piece for
@NewYorker
, a "personal history" that begins when the assassin James Earl Ray moved in to my L.A. neighborhood.
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Oh my.
@nytimesbooks
asked the legendary travel writer Paul Theroux to read my new novel, The Last Great Road Bum. (Which is out today!) He wrote a wonderful, wonderful review. Reading his thoughtful words about my work are a highlight of my career.
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The most infuriating thing was to read works of historical fiction (by some of our most celebrated writers) that were set in times and places where Latino people played a central role in the real-life story—and to see Latino people erased from the narrative. 7/8
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U.S. Literature, like other mass media, most often tackles questions of class (income equality, exploitation) as stories about ethnic identity. Being poor and proud and angry about it in fiction usually means you’re a “person of color.” Or a character in a dystopian novel. 3/8
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This might be a landmark in U.S. magazine history. A national magazine,
@Harpers
, paid a Latino writer (me) to drive 9,000 miles across the U.S. and explain what "Latino" means. Read my road-trip story here, with entries from every time zone.
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In the U.S. imagination, “Latino” identity is often equated with working-class status. It was no surprise, then, that time and again in those 150 nominated books (only a handful of which were written by Latinx writers) I saw Latino characters only in thin, supporting roles. 6/8
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Demon Copperhead, a novel filled with dysfunctional and drug-addicted Appalachian people, offers plentiful examples of the patronizing attitude our country’s cultural elite has toward poor “white” people. It was an often-beautiful book—that just as often truly offended me. 4/8
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As an author, I’m grateful for every good thing that happens to me. Today’s print edition of the Sun.
@nytimesbooks
has a complete page dedicated to my novel The Last Great Road Bum, and the wonderful review by Paul Theroux. Thank you, writing gods. I promise to pay it forward.
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One of the wonderful things about being published by
@mcdbooks
is the care, craft, and art they put into creating their books. Just got my first box of hardcovers. Absolutely gorgeous.
#thelastgreatroadbum
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Is there a greater honor than being recognized by your fellow writers? The editors
@latimesbooks
polled 95 writers on their favorite LA fiction of all time. And there's my The Barbarian Nurseries, next to Pynchon, Didion, Fante, Nguyen. I'm speechless😢
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Nice. In print. On paper. Thanks again
@_franciscocantu
and
@nytimesbooks
for the thoughtful, beautiful review of my book Our Migrant Souls.
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Be patient, new authors: Books are durable. They travel well through time. Example: My 1st novel, The Tattooed Solider. Sold it for $5K to a small press in 97. Now a
@PicadorUSA
book, it's being read in schools across the US, (including Harvard) by people who weren't born then.
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My piece for the New Yorker: "The Souls of Brown Folk," on Trump, Latinos and W.E.B. DuBois
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Twenty five years as a published author have taught me to have the lowest possible expectations about the public reception for my work. (And I never ask about sales). Tell yourself you're just looking for one reader. If you find that reader, you're blessed.
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Thankful for this simple truth: I am a writer who can pay his bills, support his family. A community of people makes this possible: editors, family, friends, university colleagues, agents, publicists, readers. Writing is a solitary task; but it takes a village to make a writer.
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Honored and humbled to see my story “The Sins of Others” in The Best American Stories 2022. It’s my Kafkaesque take on the cruelties and absurdities of immigration detention. Thanks to
@ovillalon
and
@zyzzyvamag
who first published it. This is my 2nd appearance in BASS.
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Please join me next week for the official launch of my book "Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of 'Latino.'" On Tuesday, May 9, at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles. 133 N Larchmont Blvd
Los Angeles.
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I got up this morning and retrieved my newspaper, and saw that my name was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. (Nice surprise). My story is about the events of 1992 in LA, and how they played out in one very integrated high school in Long Beach.
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Today's obituary for Gloria Molina, written by
@GustavoArellano
for
@latimes
, will take you on an amazing journey through the history of Mexican-American political activism. Gloria Molina was one of a kind, an essential figure in California history.
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The last 4 years of my writing life have been a huge gamble: I'm betting that there are thousands of intelligent readers hungry to read an adventure story that also aims to be a work of art and a work of thought. It's all based on a faith that books and language still matter.
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If CNN covered the intensity of everyday life in Central America with the same wall-to-wall coverage it devotes to the invasion of Ukraine, people across the US would be putting up Salvadoran and Honduran flags on their lawns, demanding sanctuary for migrants. What a travesty.
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A cheer, applause please, for young moms everywhere. Here is mi querida madre, Mercedes Alvarez, age twenty and newly arrived from Guatemala, at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, Spring 1963.
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On Saturday, I finished the first draft of my new, sixth book, an extended essay on the meanings and myths of "Latino" or "Latinx" identity in our times. On Sunday morning, I started work on my next book, a novel. Because...what else am I going to do?
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I support the
@LATLatinoCaucus
because it's about time there was one... Because I want to see the real Los Angeles reflected in my hometown newspaper (an institution to which I gave 20+ years of my life). And because our community built L.A., and defines L.A., and bleeds for it.
Share this graphic and tell us why you're supporting us ✍️
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The public life of a writer: a series of micro-glories punctuated by the occasional micro-humiliation. Followed by a private awareness that the various measures of literary "success" are largely meaningless, arbitrary, and shallow. And that just having written is its own triumph.
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The best thing about being an author isn't the "book tour." No. It's just being read. I remember the 1st reader I met when my 1st novel was out: Salvadoreño student at Pasadena CC. He told me his dad had read it too. My entire career as a writer was justified at that moment.
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Proud to write this piece for the
@nytopinion
Sunday Review on the "diaspora renaissance." The wave of immigrant-inspired art and culture in the U.S. that serves as an antidote to the hatreds and racism of our times.
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Birthday gifts: my daughter played in her first high-school softball game; my son called me from college in NYC; I delivered a lecture on Central American history that brought some students to tears; and another on an immigrant poet that held 120 undergrads in rapt attention.
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My 13-year-old daughter, while writing a short story: "I'm stuck!"
Me: "Have you tried procrastinating? That's what I do when I'm stuck."
Her: "That's what I'm doing now."
Me: "You have to procrastinate more. It always works for me. Trust me, I'm a professional."
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The glamorous life of an author, episode 672: I am interviewed by a radio personality who begins by telling me, “I haven’t read your books and I don’t know who you are.” Lovely.
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Mike Davis once said the 92 LA riots were 3 things: 1) an Af-Am uprising against police abuse; 2) a pogrom against Asian merchants; and 3) a Latino poverty riot. Now 2020 is 2 things: a multiethnic protest against police abuse; and a nationwide youth riot spurred by inequality.
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From the rarely heard people at the Department of Good News: Latinos are now attending college at the highest rate ever; and the Latino drop-out rate from high school has reached a new low.
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2020 will be remembered as the 1968 of this century. A year of social and political upheaval that defines a generation. Or maybe it's 1918 (pandemic), 1929 (economic crash) and 1968 (social upheaval, divisive election) wrapped all into one.
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I've recently undertaken a radical change in my lifestyle. I've started to use the Oxford comma. Always. It's fun, smart, and different.
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Reader, to me, in an email. "I really enjoyed your story in the LA Times about my friend. Just one correction: He's not 43 years old, he's in his mid seventies." My reply: "I wrote the story in 1992. But thanks for the kind words!"
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In honor of the Fourth of July, I'm pleased to present my story "Latino Power" in this month's issue of National Geographic. With tales from Wilder, Idaho, and Whittier and Wilmington, Calif., and other centers of Latino culture.
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I love journalism most when I am the stranger who arrives, unexpectedly, to listen to someone tell a story they desperately need to tell
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Social media got you down? Try reading a printed book. A work of literary art. The effect on your mind is liberating and life-affirming.
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The deeper I get into academia, the more opaque the emails in my in box become. Professors! Grad students! Please embrace clarity of expression and economy of language in your written communications to me. Decoding your missives is exhausting.
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What I like about being a UC professor: 1) drawing on 30 years of reading to craft my lectures; 2) mentoring students, sharing a bit of wisdom about anything; 3) getting a window into young people’s lives; 4) being in the presence of their hope and energy. What I dislike: Nada!
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So, I just drove across the U.S. LA to NY. Through Nev., Utah, Colo., Kan., Mo., Ill., Ohio, Pa, et al. Insight: the U.S. is really many different nations, wrapped into one. This is the source of its strength. After mountains and prairies, Manhattan was a magical Oz at the end.
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It's only January, but this is the quote of the year: "People shouldn’t be drinking, especially when you’re a redneck, on the House floor”-- Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), describing his confrontation with other Republican congressmen after failed speaker vote.
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Student: "After taking your class, professor, I've decided to switch my major from business to English." My response: "Oh my God. What have I done?" (The student had just completed my "Writing Race" course, English 105, at UC Irvine).
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So thankful, today, for the strength and courage of immigrant families. Despite hateful rhetoric and cruel government policies, they continue to live their lives with dignity, working to feed their families. Their labor feeds and shelters all of us, making this a better country.
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You work on a book for years. The manuscript becomes part of your life. When a publisher buys it, it takes on another form: printed pages. And when the last page proofs are in your hand, and you make your final corrections, it's like saying goodbye to an old friend.
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Publisher's Weekly has named my novel, The Last Great Road Bum, one of the 10 Best Books of 2020. What a wonderful honor. Thanks again to my publisher
@mcdbooks
for all the support.
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Big news! I'm joining the NY Times as a contributing writer with the Op-Ed and Sunday Review pages. Writing monthly más o menos.
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When I was just starting as a writer, I’d think: Why is it taking me 20 drafts to write this? I’m an idiot! I don't know what I'm doing! Now I think: This is okay, but after I write 20 drafts of it, it might be good.
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If you’re anywhere near Los Angeles run to see the “Oaxaca in L.A.” murals at the Central Public Library. Such a moving and beautiful statement on the resilience and power of indigenous culture in my hometown.
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I’m in Rome, so I have to remember that “ Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and that “All roads lead to Rome.” Also, “while in Rome” I must “do as the Romans do,” but not “fiddle as Rome burns.”
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Email to an angry MAGA Latino guy: “Sorry for not responding earlier. Your email was flagged by my new Racist Hate Mail filter. You called me many names, including ‘cara de perro,’ and this caused the A.I. to dump you into a folder with fascists and klan members. Lo siento.”
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Next Thursday, June 15, at 7 p.m. I'll be on stage at the Los Angeles Public Central Library's Taper Auditorium with the great
@CarriFragoza
, discussing my book Our Migrant Souls. Please come.
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What an honor to be on NPR's All Things Considered today
@npratc
, discussing my new novel,
#TheLastGreatRoadBum
with
@arishapiro
Listen here:
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Writer heaven: Having a 13-year-old daughter who drops the word "aesthetic" into casual, Sunday-morning breakfast conversation.
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What makes you an artist is this: Experiencing rejection, and feeling devastated and then getting back to work.
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Whew! The first review of my novel The Last Great Road Bum, from
@mcdbooks
, is a rave from Publishers' Weekly. "Stunning." "A wild ride." "Brilliantly succeeds." "High-velocity prose that is both relentless and wry." "A version of Kerouac for a new age."
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Our Migrant Souls won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction this week. And I was deeply honored to share a stage with my fellow honorees: The legendary novelist James McBride (who won in fiction) and Ariel Aberg-Riger (for her work in YA literature).
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I had my first cup of coffee when I went away to college. Approximately 20,000 cups later, I've had my last. Thank you coffee. You helped me write five books, and about a million published words in all. But I'm not going to be needing you any longer.
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My piece in
@lithub
on living in Los Angeles during times of quarantine and rebellion. "The glib news anchor inside my head deadpanned: 'This happens in Los Angeles roughly every 27 years or so.' 1965. 1992. 2020."
"I saw youthful black, brown, Asian, and white faces, and I sensed their collective identification with the body of George Floyd—and a deep disgust with the rules of a consumerist, monetized society."
@TobarWriter
reflects on history in the making.
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I highly recommend David Unger’s wonderful new translation of the novel El Señor Presidente by Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias. My blurb is on the back cover—next to another one by some dude called Vargas Llosa.
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Honored to have my new work of short fiction, "The Daylight Underground," kick off
@Slate
's "Trump Story Project."
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Such an honor to be interviewed about my new novel, The Last Great Road Bum, by one of the best book critics in the United States, my old LA Times colleague
@davidulin
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My op-ed for the NY Times on why Latino anger isn't on the national radar. With a shoutout to the
@latinorebels
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I'll be talking about my new novel, The Last Great Road Bum, in a virtual event
@CityLightsBooks
with the great editor
@ovillalon
of
@zyzzyvamag
. 6 p.m. PST Wed. Sept 2, see link below. Please join us.
Join
@TobarWriter
&
@ovillalon
next Wednesday, Sept. 2, as they discuss Tobar's new novel, "The Last Great Road Bum" (
@fsgbooks
). Presented by
@CityLightsBooks
at 6 p.m. PST. For more info:
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Absolutely frightening read on Trump's long history of bigotry, including 'lynching' of Central Park 5.
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Let’s start a hashtag.
#latinxintellectual
. I'll start it: "I am a
#latinxintellectual
. I love Proust, Bolaño and Guatemalan tamales. Maybe one day, when I’ve written nine books (instead of the mere six I have already)
@VanityFair
or even, blush,
@nybooks
will write about me."
@joehagansays
This all goes back to
@TobarWriter
’s very salient — and sad — point that too many Americans still don’t think of Latinos as intellectuals, as thought leaders, as people who can speak to anything else other than being Latino. Fuck that!
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My 1st NYT op-ed has a tongue-in-cheek headline: Viva Gentrification! It's about insidious racial segregation in LA
http://t.co/idkWLG1XDl
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A piece in which I remember meeting García Márquez; and what I learned from his books:
http://t.co/QbH4aj0DOl
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Yeah, that's my name you see on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review today. I'm one of four "accomplished writers" asked to revisit a favorite political novel from the past. :) I chose "El Señor Presidente" by Miguel Angel Asturias.
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My op-ed for the
@nytopinion
on a quiet act of cultural resistance in Calif: the vote for bilingual education.
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My piece for
@nytopinion
on the history of white supremacy behind the El Paso attack, and on the "highways of memory" that connect so many American families to that border city.
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In addition to expressing my horror at the news of the attack on Salman Rushdie at Chautauqua, I want to say this: he's a good, great man. Generous, charming, and supremely dedicated to the defense of writers of all stripe. May the gods fight for you at this hour, Salman
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Hard to capture just how disturbing it is to watch a man run for president and rise in polls by insulting your people again and again.
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I love being a writer. Ain't rich, but am happy. Every day a discovery, and hopefully a new creation, living with words and more words
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I'm a character in a play! So humbled to see
@AnnaDeavereS
include my thoughts on race, whiteness and Latinidad in her canonical play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992. It's now running at
@CTGLA
's Mark Taper Forum. Here I am with cast and crew. And w/Anna on opening night. See it now!
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Excellent, essential, eye-opening piece by
@mckaycoppins
on how Trump has cultivated the "Fringe Establishment"
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I discovered Toni Morrison's work in college--in a bookstore off campus, since we didn't have classes back then assigning the works of POC. I devoured Sula, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon. These books gave me the idea that I might create literature one day. Gracias, maestra.
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What does 'Latino' or 'Latinx' really mean, if anything? Tomorrow, Feb. 3, I'll tackle that question in a virtual talk for the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. 9 a.m. PT, Noon ET. Please join us, and learn a bit about my next book.
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Crazy Hilary got lost on the LA freeways apparently. She left Tijuana headed north, got to Palm Springs and made a left, going west all the way to Compton, then a sharp right on the 110 to Dodger Stadium, and then up the 5 into the desert, where she got lost looking for Vegas.
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I'm now working on a book that is a complicated weave of ideas, images, and memories. So complicated, that if I manage to write one or two strong sentences a day, and a big mess of other stuff, that is a good day.
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Two centroamericano writers on the same Top 10 list? Congrats
@robvato
. And thanks, a thousand times over, to
@davidulin
for including us on this
@latimesbooks
list!
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On the red carpet in Hollywood for the premier of
#The33
, the film based on my book with
@VirgiEspino
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