100 Books Like Making Hispanics

This book is required reading for anyone wanting to understand how race operates in the U.S. as an ever-changing social construct.

While many people only read Chapter 4 (the one usually assigned in college courses), I urge you to read the whole book—it’s packed with insights that are often overlooked. One line that stopped me in my tracks was on page 111: “Once specific concepts of race are widely circulated and accepted as a social reality, racial difference is not dependent on visual observation alone.” That sentence reshaped how I thought about race in education and beyond.

Omi and Winant’s work is foundational, and it’s one I returned to while writing “How Schools Make Race” to grapple with the complexities of racial formation.

I picked up this book because I was struggling to make sense of the different ways race is theorized in education. Zeus Leonardo’s work blew me away—it’s like he handed me a map to navigate the complexities of race frameworks. He breaks down four major approaches, critiques their limitations, and then introduces his own concept of “race ambivalence,” which completely shifted my perspective.

What I love most is how Leonardo doesn’t just theorize; he challenges readers to think critically about how these frameworks play out in real life. This book isn’t just for educators—it’s for anyone who wants to understand the nuances of race in society. It’s a book I keep coming back to, and it’s one I always recommend to friends who are ready to dig deeper.

Laura Gómez’s work has been foundational to my thinking about race and the Latinx community. While I also love her book Inventing Latinos, I chose Manifest Destinies because it directly answers a question one of my students once asked me: “Is Mexican American a race?”

This book is a powerful account of how the "Mexican American” racial category was created through historical and legal processes, conquest, and social struggle. When I read it, I was struck by how Gómez provides the foundation for understanding the origins of what we now call the Latinx category. If you want to understand the roots of the Latinx racial category in the U.S., this book is essential.

After I finished writing my book, a friend recommended Osagie Obasogie’s book, and I’m so grateful they did! Obasogie challenges readers—and scholars—to rethink race in a way that goes beyond the usual nod to it being a social construct.

Through his groundbreaking research with individuals who have been blind since birth, he shows how race is not just something visual but something we learn to “see.” It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to move beyond surface-level discussions of race and grapple with its deeper implications. Obasogie’s book helped me complicate my understanding of race as a construct, and it has stayed with me, shaping how I think and write about race today.

This wonderful book collects ethnographies about Indigenous peoples in the Gran Chaco. This beautiful region, where I grew up and currently teach about, links Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil and is home to over twenty-five Indigenous nations. 

The Gran Chaco is ecologically important because it is the second-largest biome in Latin America and the site of multiple extractive industries. Ranchers and soy planters are currently deforesting the region at the highest rate in the world and displacing the Indigenous peoples, forcing them into poverty, hunger, and prostitution.  

A central idea of racial neoliberalism is the erasure of concepts referencing race, taking away the very terms by which racism can be identified and critically addressed. This is a condition that, with Obama’s election in 2008, became increasingly widely identified as “the postracial.” I find this edited volume more readily than others to provide trenchant analysis of the complex relations between the condition of the postracial and its rendering of racism less readily identifiable and more challenging to address.

Although I’m not a big fan of memoir, I’m a big fan of this one. 

Amini’s struggles as the Persian Jewish daughter of immigrants to America looks through a window that most Americans never see. Her parents reflect the reality of Iran and its challenges to young girls with culture as a primary obstacle, culture that often feels restrictive and anachronistic in the United States.  

What spoke to me the most was Amini’s two older brothers who stepped in to fill in the glaring parenting gaps, nurturing her through coming of age in a way her parents couldn’t or wouldn’t. Although at times the reader might feel trapped in Amini’s head and heart, the ethos is absolutely proper to the memoir. Without it, the full message is lost, and the incredible triumph of her success loses context. 

This book, published in 2010, focuses on a much-neglected dimension of Marx’s work—his writings in defense of anti-colonial movements in Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere as well as his support for anti-racist movements in the U.S.

In contrast to claims that Marx was a class reductionist whose body of thought was incapable of accounting for issues of race and ethnicity, this work shows how he overcome many of the Eurocentric biases found in his earliest writings as he engaged in a systematic study of the non-Western world in the last decades of his life.

This a book that will change your view of what Marx was about from top to bottom.

I am very interested in the unique challenges that African American children face in the United States. The impacts and continuing effects of slavery and systemic racism begin affecting them before they can articulate the discrimination they experience. This book makes me question the root causes of prejudice and how it is instilled in and inflicted on children.

This book by Naomi Griffiths is excellent for anyone who wants to understand who the Acadians were (and still are)—and how they came to be considered a people distinct from French. The book is indispensable to grasp the basic characteristics of Acadians in the 17th and 18th centuries and the many challenges they faced. As Griffiths shows, the deportation did not destroy the Acadian community. In spite of a horrific death toll, nine years of proscription, and the forfeiture of property and political rights, the Acadians continued to be a cohesive community in Nova Scotia and other areas where they settled. Instead of destroying the Acadian community, the deportation proved to be a source of inspiration in the formation of a strong Acadian identity in the 19th century and beyond.