Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize
Our Migrant Souls Is an Essential Exploration of ‘Latino’ Identity
Héctor Tobar is the winner of the 2024 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for Our Migrant Souls …
Héctor Tobar is the winner of the 2024 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for Our Migrant Souls …
Melanie Almeder is the winner of the 2024 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize for “Coyote Hour” …
In the name of beer sales and taco Tuesday nights, Cinco de Mayo has morphed from a symbol of …
I have been studying and writing about Roman emperors for more than 30 years. I never imagined …
When I was growing up in the ’80s in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet dictatorship, air quality was the environmental problem most present in our lives. It determined whether we could drive that day, how overwhelmed hospitals would be, and whether or not we would have physical education at school.
Global warming was unheard of. And plastic was our friend: a cheap, versatile, and durable material that let us play, move about, and simplify our lives. We never anticipated its long-lastingness would become a problem.
During those politically tumultuous years …
“Do you know Huell Howser?”
I got that question recently while chatting with a counter guy at Erick Schat’s Bakery, which produces Dutch pastries and sheepherder bread in the Eastern Sierra town of Bishop.
It’s a question I get at least a couple times a year, in all different corners of California.
I suppose it’s a natural question. People might wonder if I, a longtime chronicler of California’s places, get asked if I know the public television reporter who took viewers into every little town and restaurant and museum, from Alturas to Zzyzx.
It’s a question that never ceases to amaze me. Or stump me.
Because the truth is that I can’t possibly know …
On the rarified second level of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, amid premium owner suites and premium beer sales, there’s an Angela Davis quote plastered on a wall.
“Our histories never unfold in isolation,” reads the excerpt from the scholar and activist’s 2015 book, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. “We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories …