This list of fiction and nonfiction books, compiled by Susan Conlon, MLS, and Kim Dorman, Community Engagement Coordinator, from Princeton Public Library, provides a range of perspectives on the issues raised by the POV documentary Fruits of Labor.

Ashley, a Mexican-American teenager living in California, dreams of graduating high school and going to college. But when ICE raids threaten her family, Ashley is forced to become the breadwinner, working days in the strawberry fields and nights at a food processing company.A co-presentation of POV and VOCES, co-produced by POV and Latino Public Broadcasting. Official Selection, SXSW Film Festival

Adult Non-Fiction

Anderson, M. Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. Oakland, California: University of California Press 2013.
M. Kat Anderson presents a wealth of information on native land management practices gleaned in part from interviews and correspondence with Native Americans who recall what their grandparents told them about how and when areas were burned, which plants were eaten and which were used for basketry, and how plants were tended. The complex picture that emerges from this and other historical source material dispels the hunter-gatherer stereotype long perpetuated in anthropological and historical literature. We come to see California's indigenous people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this traditional ecological knowledge is essential if we are to successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably.

Avila, Elena and Joy Parker. Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. New York, New York: TarcherPerigee Penguin Random House, 2000.
An autobiographical account of how a psychiatric nurse specialist became a folk medicine healer.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century,New York, New York: Monthly Review Press: 1998.
First published in 1974, this new edition features and introduction by John Bellamy foster that sets the work in historical and theoretical context.This book started what came to be called ‘the labor process debate’ This had as its focus a close examination the nature of ‘skill’ and the finding that there was a decline in the use of skilled labor as a result of managerial strategies of workplace control, and workers resistance to such managerial strategies.

Chavez, Leo. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing, 1997.
One of the few case studies of undocumented immigrants available, this insightful anthropological analysis humanizes a group of people too often reduced to statistics and stereotypes. The hardships of Hispanic migration are conveyed in the immigrants' own voices while the author's voice raises questions about power, stereotypes, settlement, and incorporation into American society.

Freeman, John. Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation. New York, New York: Penguin Random House, 2017.
In Tales of Two Americas, some of the literary world's most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches many people.

Hinojosa, Maria. Once I Was You A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020.
In Once I Was You, Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago. This honest and heartrending memoir paints a vivid portrait of how we got here and what it means to be a survivor, a feminist, a citizen, and a journalist who owns her voice while striving for the truth.

Lopez, Ann. The Farmworkers’ Journey. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2007.
The Farmworkers' Journey brings together the many facets of this issue into a comprehensive and accessible narrative: how corporate agribusiness operates, how binational institutions and laws promote the subjugation of Mexican farmworkers, how migration affects family life, how genetically modified corn strains pouring into Mexico from the United States are affecting farmers, how migrants face exploitation from employers, and more. The Farmworkers' Journey traces the human consequences of our policy decisions.

Luiselli, Valeria. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 2017.
Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear-both here and back home.

Martínez-Matsuda, Verónica, First. Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Migrant Citizenship provides insights into public policy concerning migrant workers, federal intervention in poor people's lives, and workers' cross-racial movements for social justice and offers a precedent for those seeking to combat the precarity in farm labor relations today.

Mintz, Sidney W.Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
Mintz shows how sugar was transformed from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life, and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry.

Rouch, Jean, Ciné-Ethnography, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Ciné-Ethnography, collects Rouch’s key writings, interviews and other materials that distill his thinking on filmmaking, ethnography, and his own career. Rough discusses the ethnographic film as a genre, the history of African cinema, his experiences of filmmaking among the Songhay, and the intertwined histories of French colonialism, anthropology, and cinema.

Sotelo, Analicia. Virgin. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2018.
In Virgin, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. At every step, Sotelo’s poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail—grilled meat, golden habañeros, and burnt sugar—before delivering clear-eyed and eviscerating insights into power, deceit, relationships, and ourselves. Here is what it means to love someone without truly understanding them. Here is what it means to be cruel. And here is what it means to become an artist, of words and of the self.

Williams, Justine M. (ed) and Eric Holt Giménez (ed). Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons. Oakland, California: Food First Books, 2017.
Land Justice looks at the advances that the various strands of the food movement have made in recent decades in the movement for fairer, healthier, and more autonomous food and makes a case for a more equitable, just sustainable agricultural system..

Wright, Angus Lindsay. The Death of Ramón Gonzálex: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005.
The key problems facing modern agricultural development are analyzed through the lens of the development of the research program leading to the Green Revolution in Mexico, and more broadly, the history of Mexican rural development. A field study of the dangers of pesticides to farmworkers in northern Mexico epitomizes the larger issues raised. Widely used in courses in fields from ecology to history and sociology.

Zavella, Patricia. I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011.
I’m Neither Here nor There explores how immigration influences the construction of family, identity, and community among Mexican Americans and migrants from Mexico. Drawing on close interactions with mexicans on both sides of the border, Zavella examines migrant journeys to and within the United States, gendered racialization, and exploitation at workplaces, and the challenges that migrants face in forming and maintaining families. As she demonstrates, the desires of migrants to express their identities publicly and to establish a sense of cultural memory are realized partly through Latin American and Chicano protest music, and Mexican and Indigenous folks songs played by musicians and cultural activists.

Adult Fiction

Engel, Patricia. Infinite Country: A Novel. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.
Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family in the north. Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret, and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.

Hernandez, Tim Z. Breathing, In Dust. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2015.
Seventeen-year-old Tlaloc, namesake of the Aztec god of fertility and destruction, has grown up among the migrant-worker communities that follow the seasons from Wyoming’s beet fields to the vineyards and packinghouses of the Central Valley. Bearing witness to a gritty landscape of wrenching contrasts, Loc narrates the bitter desires and crushed hopes of his friends and family: his father’s absence and his grandparents’ deaths, Zeta’s reckless abandon, Arturín’s path to prison, Norma’s tragic alienation, the farmworkers’ final tributes to Cesar Chavez, Talina’s choices and compromises. Even so he dares to dream, sensing that somewhere within the cruel beauty that surrounds him may lie his own redemption. Tim Z. Hernandez’s land of pain and plenty, his Catela, evokes the essence of the migrant underclass experience. But more, his stories take us there, into the streets and into the groves, into the back rooms of the carnicerias and the panaderias, onto the tracks, onto the thirsty highways, in scenes that unfold with graphic, breathtaking honesty

Herrera, Yuri. Signs Preceding the End of the World. Sheffield, England: And Other Stories, 2015.
Yuri Herrera explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God, New York, New York: Amistad, 2006.
Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford’s evolving selfhood through three marriages.

Sylvester, Natalia. Everyone Knows You Go Home. New York, New York: Little A, 2018.
The first time Isabel meets her father-in-law, Omar, he’s already dead―an apparition appearing uninvited on her wedding day. Her husband, Martin, still unforgiving for having been abandoned by his father years ago, confesses that he never knew the old man had died. So Omar asks Isabel for the impossible: persuade Omar’s family―especially his wife, Elda―to let him redeem himself. When Martin’s teenage nephew crosses the Mexican border and takes refuge in Isabel and Martin’s home, questions about past and future homes, borders, and belonging arise that may finally lead to forgiveness―and alter all their lives forever.

Valdez, Kristin. The Five Wounds: A Novel. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.
It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.

Xilonen, Aura, First. The Gringo Champion. New York, New York: Europa Editions, 2017.
Liborio has to leave Mexico, a land that has taught him little more than a keen instinct for survival. He crosses the Rio Bravo, like so many others, to reach "the promised land." In his new home, he finds a job at a bookstore. He falls in love with a woman so intensely that his fantasies of her verge on obsession. And, finally, he finds himself on a path that just might save him: he becomes a boxer.This is a migrant's story of deracination, loneliness, fear, and finally, love told in a sparkling, innovative prose.

Non-Fiction For Younger Readers

Binford, Warren. Hear My Voice/Escucha mi voz: The Testimonies of Children Detained at the Southern Border of the United States (English and Spanish Edition). New York, NY: Workman Publishing Company; Bilingual edition, 2021).
A picture book for older children and families that introduces a difficult topic, amplifying the voices and experiences of immigrant children detained at the border between Mexico and the US. The children's actual words (from publicly available court documents) are assembled to tell one heartbreaking story, in both English and Spanish (back to back). Each spread is illustrated in striking full-color by a different Latinx artist.

Brill, Marlene Targ. Dolores Huerta Stands Strong: The Woman who demanded justice. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018.
The book chronicles Huerta's life from the mining communities of the Southwest where her father toiled, to the vineyards and fields of California, working for fair treatment for others, co-founding the National Farmworkers Association, and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012.

Brimner, Larry Dane.Without Separation: Prejudice, Segregation, and the Case of Roberto Alvarez. New York, NY: Calkins Creek, a division of Boyds Mills & Kane, 2021.
This important yet little-known civil rights story focuses on Roberto Alvarez, a student whose 1931 court battle against racism and school segregation in Lemon Grove, California, is considered the first time an immigrant community used the courts to successfully fight injustice.

Brown, Monica. Side by side: The Story of Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez/Lado a lado: La Historia de Dolores Huerta y César Chávez. New York, New York: : HarperCollins Español/Quill Tree Books, imprints of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2020.
Describes the partnership between Dolores Huerta and César Cháves, the founding of the National Farm Workers Association, and their combined efforts to improve working conditions for agricultural laborers. Presented in English and Spanish.

Herrera, Juan Felipe. El Canto de las Palomas (Calling the Doves). San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press, 2001.
The author recalls, in both English and Spanish, his childhood in the mountains and valleys of California with his farm-worker parents who inspired him with poetry and song.

Morales, Areli. Areli is a Dreamer: A True story.New York, New York: Random House Studio, 2021.
When Areli was just a baby, her parents moved from Mexico to New York with her brother, Alex, to make a better life for the family–and when she was in kindergarten, they sent for her, too. Everything in New York was different. Gone were the Saturdays at Abuela’s house, filled with cousins and sunshine. Instead, things were busy and fast and noisy. Areli’s limited English came out wrong, and schoolmates accused her of being illegal. But with time, America became her home. And she saw it as a land of opportunity, where millions of immigrants who came before her paved their own paths. She knew she would, too.

Morales, Yuyi.Dreamers.New York, New York: Neal Porter Books, 2018.
An illustrated picture book autobiography in which award-winning author Yuyi Morales tells her own immigration story.

Reynoso, Naibe. Be bold! Be brave!: 11 Latinas who made U.S. history/¡Sé audaz, sé valiente!: 11 Latinas que hicieron historia en Estados Unidos. Los Angeles, California: Con Todo Press, 2019.
A bilingual book in rhyming verse that highlights 11 Latinas who excelled in their professions and made U.S. History by accomplishing something that hadn’t been done before in various fields including medicine, science, sports, art and politics.

Fiction For Younger Readers

Bowles, David O.​​They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid's Poems. El Paso, Texas: Cinco Puntos Press, 2018.
Twelve-year-old Güero, a red-headed, freckled Mexican American border kid, discovers the joy of writing poetry, thanks to his seventh grade English teacher.

Cisneros, Ernesto. Efrén Divided.New York, New York: Harper, 2020.
While his father works two jobs, seventh-grader Efrén Nava must take care of his twin siblings, kindergartners Max and Mia, after their mother is deported to Mexico.

Delacre, Lulu. Us, in Progress: Short stories about young Latinos.New York, New York: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2017.
Author and Pura Belpré Award honoree Lulu Delacre's illustrated collection of twelve short stories is a look at the diverse Latinos who live in the United States. In this book meet many young Latinos living in the United States, from a young girl whose day at her father's burrito truck surprises her to two sisters working together to change the older sister's immigration status, and more.

Diaz, Alexandra. Santiago's Road Home.New York, New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2020.
Fleeing abusive relatives and extreme poverty in Mexico, young Santiago endures being detained by ICE while crossing the border into the United States.

Dominguez, Angela. Stella Díaz Never Gives Up. New York, New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2020.
A story about a shy Mexican-American girl who becomes an environmental activist and makes a difference in her community.

Kemp, Laekan Zea. Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet. New York, New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2021.
Told in two voices, Pen, whose dream of taking over her family's restaurant has been destroyed, and Xander, a new, undocumented, employee seeking his father, form a bond. Young Adult Fiction, ages 14+.

Pérez, Celia C. The First Rule of Punk.New York, New York: Viking, 2017.
Twelve-year-old María Luisa O'Neill-Morales (who really prefers to be called Malú) reluctantly moves with her Mexican-American mother to Chicago and starts seventh grade with a bang--violating the dress code with her punk rock aesthetic and spurning the middle school's most popular girl in favor of starting a band with a group of like-minded weirdos.

Pérez, Celia C. Strange Birds: A Field Guide to Ruffling Feathers. New York, New York: Kokila, 2019.
The story of four kids who form an alternative Scout troop that shakes up their sleepy Florida town, as they learn more about community, and the role an individual has in impacting the world.

Sánchez, Erika L.I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2017.
Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. Young Adult Fiction, ages 14+.