13 Nonfiction Books by Latinx Authors Published in 2025

It’s Latino Books Month! Started in 2004 by the Rhode Island Latino Arts, this is celebrated every May to spotlight Latinx authors, illustrations, and books across genres in English and Spanish. More than anything, the celebration was designed to inspire the next generation of Latinx creatives to pursue writing as a viable career. Of course, as with other genres, Latinx writers are grossly underrepresented in nonfiction.

That’s why we decided to put together a round-up of nonfiction books by Latinx authors that will be released this year. From cookbooks that spotlight our culture through food to memoirs-in-essays, there’s sure to be something for every kind of reader. This is by no means an exhaustive list but a starting place as you curate your TBR lists for the year. Read on to learn more about 13 nonfiction books by Latinx authors that we’re excited to read in 2025.

1. My (Half) Latinx Kitchen: Half Recipes, Half Stories, All Latin American by Kiera Wright-Ruiz

Release Date: February 11, 2025

My (Half) Latinx Kitchen by Kiera Wright-Ruiz is a cookbook that is a testament to Wright-Ruiz’s Latinx and Asian heritage. A first-generations American, she didn’t grow up with the traditions of her various home countries but her family – including her mom, dad, grandparents, and foster parents – did teach her something about Latinx identity through food. Part Latinx, part Asian, part American, this cookbook is a vibrant celebration of Latin American food, featuring 100 recipes for dishes like Ecuadorian Seco de Pollo, Peruvian Ceviche, Elote Taquitos, Puerto Rican Pernil, and Okonomiyaki Quesadillas. Wright-Ruiz also includes personal essays alongside each recipe, like how tamale soup brought her family together after years of being separated from each other in foster care. Traveling from Ecuador to Mexico to Cuba, this is a love letter to people and diaspora.

2. Tsunami: Women’s Voices from Mexico edited by Heather Cleary, Gabriela Jauregui, Julianna Neuhouser, Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, and Julia Sanches

Release Date: February 11, 2025

Tsunami is a new anthology edited by Heather Cleary, Gabriela Jauregui, Julianna Neuhouser, Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, and Julia Sanches. Featuring personal essays, manifestos, creative nonfiction, and poetry, the book gives voice to Mexican writers on important political topics like patriarchy, gender violence, community building, the #MeToo movement, Indigenous rights, eurocentrism, the three feminist waves throughout Latin America, and more. The collection includes diverse voices from the diaspora including trans voices, Indigenous voices, Afro-Latinx voices, and academic and non-academic voices. Some of the contributors include Marina Azahua, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Dahlia de la Cerda, and Alexandra R. DeRuiz.

3. Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez

Release Date: February 11, 2025

Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez is a collection of personal essays the follows Gomez’s childhood and later life growing up in Florida: the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother were too terrified to call the ambulance, or when when he worked at the Flip Flop Shop to put sandals on tourists’ feet as a broke college student, or when he went to Pulse nightclub with his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends. Touching on love, purpose, and community, this memoir charts his quest to escape out of poverty and to run away in zigzags for the sake of survival, much how you escape if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator.

4. The Latinx Guide to Liberation: Healing from Historical, Generational, and Individual Trauma by Vanessa Pezo 

Release Date: February 21, 2025

The Latinx Guide by Vanessa Pezo is a book by and for the Latinx community. For centuries, the impact of colonialism, generational trauma, and individual trauma within the community has been ignored and overlooked. This guide not only acknowledges that this trauma exists – including systematic oppression. but also offers tips and strategies to achieve healing and liberation. It unpacks harmful stereotypes, undoes narratives that encourage shame and embarrassment when we struggle with mental health issues, and discuss the importance of cultural empowerment, awareness, and transformation. And bonus, it comes with reflection questions, healing exercises, and action steps that you can do at home as you process how you, your families, and your communities have been impacted by different types of trauma.

5. Portrait of a Feminist: A Memoir in Essays by Marianna Marlowe

Release Date: February 25, 2025

Portrait of a Feminist is a memoir by Marianna Marlowe that discusses her evolution as a biracial and multicultural woman. She touches on her childhood in California as the child of a Catholic Peruvian mother and an atheist American father. As she meditates on how feminists are born, how we become aware of unjust realities and oppression, she also discusses her adulthood in California, Peru, and Ecuador, being part of a family that traveled and lived abroad, as well as her multiple occupations as an academic, wife, and mother. Touching on unequal marriages, class structures, misogynist literature, and patriarchal religion, this is a touching portrait of a feminist’s life, what it looks like to defend feminism, how feminism should evolve and change to meet the needs of today’s women.

6. Make It Plant-Based! Mexican by Andrea Aliseda 

Release Date: May 13, 2025

Make It Plant-Based! Mexican is a new cookbook by Andrea Aliseda is part of a plant-based cooking series focusing on various cultures around the world. As Aliseda turns her sights to Mexico, she shares traditional Mexican recipes with an easy vegan twist that makes plants the star of each plate. Using pantry staples, vegetables, fruit, and alternatives for meat and dairy, the cookbook features delicious recipes for starters, mains, masa-based meals, tacos, desserts, and salsas, including Cabbage and Poblano Flautas, Squash Blossom Tempura, Zucchini Baja Fried “Fish” Tacos, Plant-Based Buttercream Tres Leches, Umami Guacamole, and more. This will quickly become a well-used cookbook in your kitchen!

7. Echoes of the Water War: Legacies of Cochabamba, Bolivia by Oscar Olivera

Release Date: April 15, 2025

Echoes of the Water War by trade union machinist Oscar Olivera is a powerful documentation of the Bolivian water warriors, ordinary people in Cochabamba who formed a grassroots effort and protested against the privatization of water, which later became known as the 2001 “water wars.” As a participant and leader in the movement himself, Olivera shares how the city sold their water supply to a US-based company, how water prices rose astronomically, and how people organized and fought back against injustice. In vivid, engaging detail, he tells an extraordinary story of democracy, human rights, solidarity, mutual aid, and how the masses not only won popular control of the water supply, but also drove out the corporation who had stolen their water — just in time for the movement’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

8. Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town by Ana Hebra Flaster

Release Date: April 22, 2025

Property of the Revolution by Ana Hebra Flaster tells an extraordinary story of migration, politics, and new beginnings. She begins when she’s six years old, and her working-class family is kicked out of Havana for opposing communism after being disillusioned by Castro and his administration. Within forty-eight hours, they lost their home, country, and family, and immediately fled to the U.S. to start a new life in 1967 New Hampshire. This is not only her individual story but the her entire family lineage: how her elders survived political upheaval and historic events, impossible choices, and living as refugees in foreign lands, how it was the spirit of wisdom of her family’s women who led their escape out of Cuba and shaped their family’s new identity as Cuban Americans. This is a story of love, will, and new beginnings in America.

9. Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings edited by Fernanda Díaz-Basteris & Maite Urcaregui

Release Date: April 25, 2025

Latinx Comics Studies edited by Fernanda Díaz-Basteris & Maite Urcaregui is a collection of groundbreaking essays, pedagogical reflections, and original and republished short comics from Latinx voices across the Latin American diaspora. The pieces touch on themes of national identity, memory, undocumented lives, Indigenous and Afro-Latinx experiences, multiracial and multilingual identities, transnational and diasporic connections, natural disasters and unnatural colonial violence, feminist and queer interventions, Latinx futurities, and more. This is a testament to the past, present, and future of Latinx comics, as well as how Latinx peoples push against the boundaries of “Latinx” by portraying the diversity of the community’s lived experiences.

10. Latine Herbalism: A Beginner’s Guide to Modern Curanderismo, Healing Plants, and Folk Traditions of the Americas by Iosellev Castañeda

Release Date: April 29, 2025

Latine Herbalism by advocate and practicioner Iosellev Castañeda is the book about Latine folk herbalism and modern curanderismo that we have all been waiting for. Fusing traditional and contemporary practices, this guidebook covers the medicinal power of herbs and plants; their origins; their uses; and folk traditions from across the U.S., Mexico, and South America. It also gives guidance for common physical and mental challenges, such as digestive issues and stress managements, through remedios y rituales like breath and heart vibrations, flower spirit, and moon energy, among other strategies.

11. Theory of the Rearguard: How to Survive Contemporary Art (and Almost Everything Else) by Iván de la Nuez

Release Date: April 29, 2025

Theory of the Rearguard by Iván de la Nuez is a critique and exploration of contemporary art in relation to survival and a much-anticipated response to the cult classic, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, which focused on how art demanded to break its representation and destroy the barrier that separated it from life. Forty years later, Nuez argues that it’s not the distance between art and life that’s the issue but the tension between art and survival, art and politics, art and iconography, art and literature. With sharpness and engagement, he offers a fascinating meditation on the end of contemporary art as we know it.

12. So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color by Caro De Robertis

Release Date: May 13, 2025

So Many Stars by Caro De Robertis is a coming-of-age story based upon interviews with twenty trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color, discussing how they created spaces for themselves and their communities against oppressive systems, cultures, and practices. Preserving their words and stories for future generations, readers will gain vibrant snapshots of their life growing up, navigating complex family issues and dynamics, finding community, coming out, allowing their identity to evolve, building movements, finding language for their queer experiences, surviving the AIDS crisis, and sharing much-needed wisdom and advice. Riveting, joyful, and heartbreaking, this a singular story made up of a community’s personality, wisdom, and anecdotes about how to live an authentic life despite all odds.