Seven African leaders have paid their respects in Bucha, a town near Kyiv where hundreds of dead bodies were uncovered after Russian forces retreated.

For the writer Héctor Tobar, latinidad, which means something like “Latino-ness,” or the condition of being Latino, is both sweeping and particular: It encompasses all those who identify as Latino and at the same time nods to the fact that each Latino experience is highly individual. In his new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”, Tobar writes that Latinos “have crossed oceans and deserts, and entered into new and exotic urban ‘barrios’ and ‘ghettos,’ and planted roots in farm towns on vast and verdant plains.” But these shared histories have meant different things for those whose families come from Andalusia, Oaxaca, or Texas. As Tobar writes, Latinos “will not fit in any box.” The feeling of being ni de aquí, ni de allá—from neither here nor there—is the fundamental paradox of latinidad, its very essence.

A professor of journalism and Chicano and Latino studies at UC Irvine, Tobar is the author of several books, including The Tattooed Soldier, a novel about a Guatemalan refugee in Los Angeles who is still haunted by his home country’s civil war; Deep Down Dark, a nonfiction account of the dramatic story of the 33 miners who were trapped in an underground mine in Chile in 2010; and The Last Great Road Bum, a novel based on the adventurous life of Joe Sanderson, an American who died fighting with Central American guerillas. These other works dovetail with his own lived experience in one way or another, but Our Migrant Souls, which begins with an address to his students, is even more personal. In it, Tobar uses the details of his own life and the broader past of Latinos in America to situate himself within the long sweep of Latino history.

Tobar’s book should be read in the context of other works that, for more than a century, have tried to elucidate the meaning of latinidad. In his 1891 essay “Our America,” José Martí, a Cuban writer then living in New York, argued that Latin American identity was defined, in part, by a rejection of the racism that he believed characterized the United States. The Mexican author Octavio Paz, in his 1950 book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, described the pachuco (a word used to refer to young Mexican American men, many of them gang members, in the mid-1900s) as a “pariah, a man who belongs nowhere,” alienated from his Mexican roots but not quite of the United States either. Gloria Anzaldúa, in her 1987 classic, Borderlands/La Frontera, described Chicana identity as the product of life along the U.S.-Mexico border, “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”

More recent attempts to synthesize Latino history include Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire and Laura Gómez’s Inventing Latinos, which, like Tobar’s book, argue that the legacy of colonization of the Americas by Europeans is central to what it means to be Latino. Our Migrant Souls is, therefore, only the latest attempt to pin down an inherently slippery concept. More than these other works, though, it engages in contemporary debates and issues, such as how Latinos have related to Blackness and indigeneity, the question of why some Latinos choose to identify as white, and the political conservatism of certain Latino communities. It is also the most lyrical and literary of the genre, harnessing Tobar’s deep talents as a writer and his fluency in pop culture, and offers a more intimate look into the barrios, homes, and minds of people who, he argues, have been badly, and sometimes willfully, misunderstood.

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Tobar describes the falsehoods and oversimplified narratives that get perpetuated about both Latinos and migrants—not just by bigots but also, at times, by the news media, activists, and “people who are entirely sympathetic with our ‘plight.’” (Latino and migrant are not synonymous, of course, for the obvious reason that most Latinos living in the United States today were born here. But Tobar’s main focus is on how the migrant experience has shaped Latino identity.) Racist demagogues claim that Latin American migrants represent an existential threat to the United States, like “sheep heading stupidly northward to the United States, where they will become ‘Democratic voters’ and public charges,” as Tobar writes. More mundane but also damaging are the “visuals of immigrant suffering” on the news, or stories that show Latinos as one-dimensional people who are as “pure in heart and conduct as the martyrs in a Sunday-school story.” Then there are the unconscious assumptions that white Americans might make: Here Tobar mentions the families who hire Latinos as domestics or caretakers, then, when their work is done, imagine them heading home to the “grimy and overpopulated warrens of the immigrant barrio.”

“To be Latino in the United States,” Tobar writes, “is to see yourself portrayed, again and again, as an intellectually and physically diminished subject in stories told by others.” Tobar seeks to restore Latinos’ full humanity, arguing that we need to see them as people with rich, detailed lives. We need to see them in their homes, as Tobar suggests, surrounded by the small and beautiful objects they cherish, perhaps paintings of Don Quixote or prints of Diego Rivera’s work. We need to understand that they want the same freedoms, comforts, and securities that all people have wanted since the beginning of civilization: to have a “home with a place to paint, or a big, comfortable chair to sit in and read under a lamp, with a cushion under the small of our backs.”

According to Tobar, the restoration of Latino humanity—especially for migrants—depends on an acknowledgment of the harms they have endured. Too many Americans willfully ignore the dangerous treks that, after days of exposure, kill those trying to cross into the country. Even when migrants survive the journey and settle across the United States, Tobar sees a dark thread connecting them: “Our ancestors,” he writes, “have escaped marching armies, coups d’état, secret torture rooms, Stalinist surveillance, and the outrages of rural police forces.” Tobar is referring here to the domestic conflicts, fueled by the U.S. military, in Guatemala, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other countries during the Cold War, leading to unrest and forcing civilians in those places to flee northward. “And now we stand in the United States, on a Miami street corner, or in an Atlanta suburb, working to pull the strands of our family history together, and to make ourselves feel whole, again.” For Tobar, this history of violence is something all Latinos have in common, no matter where in the country they live.  

Our Migrant Souls settles into a close-up look at Los Angeles, where Tobar has spent a lifetime trying to “unlock the code buried in the sidewalks and hidden in the street signs.” For him, Los Angeles is a city of runaways: among them, Black people from the South, migrants from Latin America, non-Latino white people, rich and poor, who have traveled there to reinvent themselves. Tobar makes a case for solidarity among these various groups, especially Black and Latino people. As he writes, Latinos “inhabit places that are never far from Black struggle and the history of white supremacy.” In a chapter titled “Walls,” he explores that proximity, telling the story of a human-smuggling ring that was discovered operating out of a home in Compton, a city with large Black and Latino populations. When 17 migrants were detained and handcuffed by immigration authorities, a Black neighbor heard the metal handcuffs hitting one another and told Tobar, “When I heard those chains, I shed a tear … Thinking of them being hungry and needy. It took me back to what we know, as Black people.”

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Tobar imagines Black and Latino people embracing their shared pasts. He laments that, in school, children “are taught a version of our national history in which each ethnic and racial group lives in its own narrative channel, following the logic of its own traditions and suffering.” He finds inspiration in an Atlanta mural by Yehimi Cabrón that depicts a “Blaxican [Black and Mexican] boy and his African American mother, reaching for butterflies”—a symbol of the undocumented—as well as in a 1970s wedding photograph of a “dapper African American man holding his Mexican bride.” He writes, “I want a theory of social revolution that begins in this kind of intimate space,” not in the symbols “appropriated by corporate America,” like the Black Lives Matter banners displayed at professional sporting events, or the CEO of JPMorgan Chase kneeling at a branch of his bank, which critics have read as virtue signaling. Mere intimacy and the recognition of common histories isn’t the same as justice, but it is a necessary starting point for healing divisions.

Our Migrant Souls made me feel a personal connection with Tobar. It isn’t often in middle age that, after an encounter with literature, you find new meaning in childhood events that you’d understood one way for decades. Yet this was Tobar’s effect on me, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one.

His book made me wonder about the racial dynamics between the two halves of my family—my mother’s side, white, and my father’s, Latino—which I’ve never asked my parents about. When Tobar writes about high-school guidance counselors who discourage their Latino students from applying to the best universities, I remembered sitting in the office of my own guidance counselor and sinking in my chair as she did the same. When he recalls the homes his aunt Gladys cleaned in Beverly Hills, I remembered accompanying my grandma while she cleaned the houses of wealthy white families in Tucson. Tobar helped me see what seemed like ordinary childhood and adolescent memories through the lens of race.

Still, as skilled as Tobar is at connecting his experience to that of others, there are many Latino stories that he does not, and probably cannot, tell. For one, he conceives of Latino history as the history of a people who have endured traumas because of the actions of the U.S. But this framing wouldn’t appeal to Latinos who see the United States as the country where their dreams came true, where they’ve built careers, bought homes, provided for their families. Having written a book about Latino Republicans, I know they would object to Tobar’s characterizations of them as angry and duped by conservative rhetoric.

In Our Migrant Souls, Tobar suggests that these Latinos merely want to “fit” into the existing power structures of the U.S. He counters: “We can’t simply request ‘our seat at the table.’ If we do so we can achieve many personal liberations, while allowing the systems of inequality to reproduce themselves.” This feels like an oversimplification of the motivations and self-perceptions of Latinos who don’t see themselves in the same way that he does. If the small number of conservative Latinos Tobar interviewed are anything like the Hispanic Republicans I’ve talked with over the years, they would tell him that it is the Republican Party that best represents their economic, religious, and political values.

Of course, no one book could account for all of the 60 million Latinos in the United States, but even the migrants Tobar focuses on demonstrate a greater range of viewpoints than he acknowledges. If our aim is to understand the full story of Latinos—assuming such a thing is possible—we should explore all of the complexities of those who live in a country that is becoming more Latino by the day. For that, we’ll need other books besides Our Migrant Souls, ones that describe the inner worlds, motives, and ambitions of Latinos who see themselves and their place in this country differently. They, too, are part of the Latino story.

The leaders also plan to visit Russia, as a diplomatic standoff brews between South African officials and Poland.

Proposal to strike a diplomatic settlement with Russia are thought to have little chance of success