What does it mean to arrive? More importantly, what does it mean to stay?
Migration is often framed as a journey from one place to another, a story that begins with departure and ends with arrival. Yet the books featured in Llegadas / Arrivals: Making Home in Latin America remind us that arrival is not an ending. It is the beginning of a longer process of building community, preserving memory, adapting traditions, and creating new forms of belonging.
Latin America has long been shaped by movement. Across centuries, people arrived from across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and neighboring regions, bringing with them languages, religions, cultural practices, family histories, and aspirations for the future. Some came seeking opportunity. Others sought refuge. Many faced uncertainty, exclusion, or displacement. Together, their experiences became part of the complex story of Latin America itself.
At the heart of many of the books in this exhibit is the question of belonging. How do individuals and communities maintain connections to their origins while becoming part of a new society? Works such as Marjorie Agosín’s Taking Root: Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America and Ignacio López-Calvo’s The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru explore how identities are preserved, reimagined, and passed between generations. Their stories reveal that belonging is rarely a choice between one place and another. Instead, it is often shaped by multiple histories, languages, and cultural traditions.
The exhibit also highlights the role of memory in community life. Memory is preserved through stories, literature, music, newspapers, and artistic expression, becoming a bridge between past and present. The House of Memory, Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960, and Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America demonstrate how communities have documented their experiences, preserved cultural traditions, and created spaces where collective histories could endure. Fiction offers another path into these conversations. In Ana María Shua’s El libro de los recuerdos, family stories become a vehicle for exploring migration, heritage, and the ways memories are carried across generations. Likewise, Quince Duncan’s Weathered Men and the Four Mirrors examines questions of identity and belonging through the experiences of Afro-Costa Rican communities, while Augusto Higa Oshiro’s La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu offers a powerful portrait of the challenges and complexities of being both Japanese and Peruvian.
Several books invite readers to consider how newcomers have shaped public life and national identities. In Los vascos en las independencias Americanas, Basque communities appear not on the margins of history but within the political transformations that gave rise to new nations. Cousins and Strangers examines the impact of migration on Buenos Aires during a period of dramatic growth, while studies such as So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico, Between Argentines and Arabs, and The New Jewish Argentina reveal how ideas of citizenship, ethnicity, and national belonging have continually evolved.
Other titles explore how communities remain connected across borders. Whether through the transnational networks examined in The Mexican Mahjar, the global connections described in New Worlds, New Lives, or the histories traced in The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, these works show that making a home in one place does not necessarily mean leaving another behind. Similar themes emerge in Siu Kam Wen’s novel La vida no es una tómbola, where characters navigate the space between inherited traditions and contemporary life, revealing the enduring ties between migration, family, and cultural identity.
The exhibit also invites us to think about the many ways communities express belonging. Music, language, literature, religion, and art all become tools for preserving memory while creating something new. From studies of Yiddish culture in Latin America and Jewish cinema to explorations of Nikkei literature and the cultural legacies of Welsh Patagonia, the books in this collection demonstrate that identity is not static. It is continuously shaped through encounter, adaptation, and creativity.
Taken together, the books in this exhibit challenge us to think of Latin America not as a fixed cultural landscape but as a place continually shaped by encounters, exchanges, and reinvention. They reveal that the history of the region is not only a history of nations, but also a history of communities whose experiences crossed languages, oceans, and borders.
Following last year’s exhibit, Entre Mundos / Between Worlds, which explored Latin American communities beyond the region, Llegadas / Arrivals turns our attention to those who came to Latin America and made it home. Their stories are not separate from the story of Latin America. They are part of it.
We invite you to explore the exhibit and discover how generations of arrivals helped create the diverse and vibrant societies of Latin America today. You can find all the books in this exhibit by visiting our online display.