Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor Latinx, was born in Mexico City to a Guatemalan-Irish American mamá from LA and a Mexican papá. Growing up in dust-belt Northern California shaped him into a storyteller. He writes, edits, and champions over 60 award-winning books, from From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides to comic books, YA graphic novels, and children’s books The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie and Con Papá / With Papá. He is Editor-in-Chief at FlowerSong Press and holds the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. Catch him on social media @professorlatinx.
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Frederick Luis Aldama
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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.
