Unbound
*Unbound is on pause for the 2024-2025 year, but please check out our growing Little Library on wheels on the second floor of the MCC for our growing collection of multimedia*
Unbound: A Latine/x Multimedia Club is a way to build small community conversations grounded in a particular text or sets of media that explore themes in relation to constructions, experiences, complexities, and challenges of Latinx/e identities. Unbound uses the framework of a book club but opens us to different modes and senses of learning and engagement that are valuable. It challenges Westernized values places upon the written word and instead says: listening and feeling are not only significant, sacred, and powerful ways of knowledge-making but are central ways of being for many marginalized communities. Sometimes we’ll read books, poems, zines, articles; sometimes listen to an album, podcast, or playlist; sometimes look at photographs or murals; sometimes watch a film or music video; but we’ll always talk about whatever it is. Each piece is meant to open conversation about identities, politics, geographies, memories, race, ethnicity, place, gender, sexuality, culture, love, joy, and more.
If you have any questions, please email latinx-msa@u.northwestern.edu.
Spring 2024
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
Book Description: " It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro “Prieto” Acevedo, are boldfaced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn, while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan’s power brokers.
Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1 percent but she can’t seem to find her own. . . until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets.
Olga and Prieto’s mother, Blanca, a Young Lord turned radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.
Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico’s history, Xochitl Gonzalez’s Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife, and the very notion of the American dream―all while asking what it really means to weather a storm."
Fall 2023
Spring 2023
- Lineage of Rain by Janel Pineda
- Book Description: “In this spellbinding debut, Los Angeles–born poet Janel Pineda sings of communal love and the diaspora and dreams for a liberated future. Lineage of Rain traces histories of Salvadoran migration and the US-sponsored civil war to reimagine trauma as a site for transformation and healing. With a scholar’s caliber, Pineda archives family memory, crafting a collection that centers intergenerational narratives through poems filled with a yearning to crystallize a new world—one unmarked by patriarchal violence. At their heart, many of these poems are an homage to women: love letters to mothers, sisters, and daughters."
Spring 2022
- Sabrina and Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
- Book Description: “Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force."
Spring 2021
- The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
- "Winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the novel follows the story of Xiomara Batista, a young Afro-Latina from Harlem who discovers poetry as an outlet to explore her mother's religion and her own place in the world, finding her voice, strength, and love in the process. Acevedo's masterfully crafted poems reflect universal themes of "adolescence, family, gender, race, religion, [and] sexuality."
Winter 2021
- The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- "One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio illuminates and honors the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation. Villavicencio amplifies the stories of day laborers, housekeepers, construction workers, and delivery workers, among many others, who have "paid a steep price for the so-called American Dream" while shaping culture and life in The United States in immeasurable ways."