Richard Thompson's Reviews > Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

I liked Hector Tobar's novel, "The Barbarian Nurseries." This was even better.

This book is a lyrical celebration of what it means to be Latino in the United States. It covers the good, the bad and all of the rest. It is beautiful. We are lucky to have these wonderful people living among us to enrich our world. The old idea of the Melting Pot is wrong. We don't need to all blend together into a single whole, but each ethnicity in the United States influences the others, so that we all become something different here than our ancestors were in their old world, wherever that was. And as Mr. Tobar points out, Latinos are not themselves a single culture within the United States but are many different interconnected cultures.

One idea that I liked is that it is better in fiction and art and journalism not to focus on Latinos as victims or as heroes. We are all victims sometimes and heroes sometimes, but that isn't who anyone is most of the time, and focusing on those aspects of a person paints a false picture that may be misleading and sometimes condescending. So in "The Barbarian Nurseries" all of Mr. Tobar's characters are imperfect. Sometimes they are harsh or stupid. They make mistakes. But still they are mostly good-hearted and are almost always interesting and ultimately sympathetic.