Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of seven books, including the memoir Our Migrant Souls:
A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”, winner of the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the novels The Tattooed Soldier and The Last Great Road Bum. His non-fiction Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of Thirty-Three Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller; it was adapted into the film The 33. Tobar’s novel The Barbarian Nurseries was a New York Times Notable Book and won the California Book Award. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, including French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin. Tobar’s fiction has also appeared in Best American Short Stories.
Tobar earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and is currently a professor there. As a journalist, he was a foreign correspondent in Latin America and Iraq. He also was part of the Los Angeles Times team that earned the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News reporting. In addition, Tobar was an op-ed contributing editor for the New York Times. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and National Geographic. In 2020, he received a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard, where he wrote Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” In 2023, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.
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*Winner of the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
"Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about "illegals" and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation. |
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With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.
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In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.
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When the San José mine collapsed outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days. After the disaster, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar received exclusive access to the miners and their tales, and in Deep Down Dark, he brings them to haunting, visceral life. We learn what it was like to be imprisoned inside a mountain, understand the horror of being slowly consumed by hunger, and experience the awe of working in such a place-underground passages filled with danger and that often felt alive. A masterwork of narrative journalism and a stirring testament to the power of the human spirit, The 33: Deep Down Dark captures the profound ways in which the lives of everyone involved in the catastrophe were forever changed.
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Antonio Bernal is a Guatemalan refugee in Los Angeles haunted by memories of his wife and child, who were murdered at the hands of a man marked with yellow ink. In a park near Antonio's apartment, Guillermo Longoria extends his arm and reveals a sinister tattoo—yellow pelt, black spots, red mouth. It is the sign of the death squad, the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army.
This chance encounter between Antonio and his family's killer ignites a psychological showdown between these two men. Each will discover that the war in Central America has migrated with them as they are engulfed by the quemazones—"the great burning" of the Los Angeles riots. A tragic tale of loss and destiny in the underbelly of an American city, The Tattooed Soldier is Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Héctor Tobar's mesmerizing exploration of violence and the marks it leaves upon us. |
Moderated Discussion of Hector's Books
Our Migrant Souls by Héctor Tobar is shortlisted for the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize.
Héctor Tobar on what it means to be Latino for the Los Angeles Times.
Héctor Tobar named 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls is the winner of the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.
Hector Tobar longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence for Our Migrant Souls.
Our Migrant Souls featured in best book of the year and book lists from major media outlets and retailers including: The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2023, NPR’s Books We Love 2023, Kirkus’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, Chicago Public Library’s Top Ten Books of 2023, Chicago Public Library’s Favorite Books of 2023, Powell’s Best Books of 2023: Nonfiction, Time Magazine’s The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023, Amazon’s Best Books of 2023, Amazon’s Top 20 Nonfiction Books of 2023, BookPage’s The Best Nonfiction of 2023, and in Nonfiction Category of Audible’s The Best of 2023 list.