San Antonio Book Festival - Frederick Luis Aldama
Photo Courtesy of Sam Ceballos
Book Festival Author

Frederick Luis Aldama

Frederick Luis Aldama (also known as Professor Latinx) was born in Mexico to a Guatemalan-Irish American mamá from East LA and a Mexican papá from Mexico City, grew up in north-central California, and holds the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He founded UT Austin’s Latinx Pop Lab and its yearly BIPOC PoP Expo & Symposium. He serves as editor-in-chief of Latinx Pop Magazine and FlowerSong Press. He is the author or editor of over 50 books that span award-winning biographies and scholarly works as well as comics, graphic novels, young-adult fiction, and children’s books. He curates ten academic and creative book series. His contributions to literature, art, and education have been honored by the Obama White House, and he has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters and The Ohio State University’s Hall of Fame.

Frederick is joining the festival to discuss From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides: A Latinx Comics Anthology, which he coedited.

More About Frederick Luis Aldama

  • From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides: A Latinx Comics Anthology

    In this comics anthology full of humor and heart, writers and artists from across the US pay tribute to the ways food and sports endure as touchstones in the Latin American diaspora. In the vein of Frederick Luis Aldama’s bestselling anthology "Tales from la Vida," creators offer slice-of-life comics in an array of styles to capture common threads that bind this dizzyingly diverse community. From a simple quesadilla eaten hot on the way to school, to a Puerto Rican grandmother’s offering of guineitos en escabeche, to a homesick Chicano punk’s reverse-engineered tamales, food is a gift from elders to children, a marker of continuity and togetherness amid a dominant culture that may dismiss its flavors. Sports, too, provide a path to friendship and connection across national and language barriers, anchoring fans and participants in a sense of identity and place, whether through the perseverance of the Mayan game pok ta’ pok, the unifying surge of lucha libre or soccer fandom, or a father and daughter’s shared love of horse racing. Together, the creators collected in "From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides" share a mosaic of stories that vividly portray Latinx identity and life today.

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