What the Festival of Books means to its authors, as told by Pulitzer winner Héctor Tobar

Author and journalist Héctor Tobar has participated in the L.A. Times Festival of Books since 1999.

This year, he’ll be part of a roundtable celebrating the festival’s 30th anniversary.

It’s a big milestone for the reporter-turned-author; participating in the festival means a lot to Tobar. Early on in his career, “it was a symbol of having arrived as a writer,” he said.

A sense of validation

When you get invited to the festival, Tobar told LAist, the event organizers give you a mug. Tobar treasured the first ones he received — so much so that he took them with him to Mexico City, when he was a correspondent there for the L.A. Times.

Tragedy ensued. One day, Tobar dropped one of his precious mugs, and it shattered. “I was almost in tears,” he said. It was the early 2000s, and Tobar was trying to write his third book, The Barbarian Nurseries. To keep faith, he glued the mug back together.

Each of Tobar’s books has taken at least three years to complete. The Barbarian Nurseries took 16. “You spend a lot of time alone,” he said. Then, once you complete a manuscript, you might encounter a great deal of rejection, he added. In those rough moments, readers sometimes unwittingly offer strength.

At the festival in 2006, for instance, a young man came up to Tobar and asked him to sign a copy of Translation Nation, a work of nonfiction. "Mr. Tobar,” he said, “I read The Tattooed Soldier, and I just want to ask: When are you going to write another novel?"

A venue for personal work

Now that he’s published six books and has another on the way, the event is more of a chance to connect with readers and writers. Tobar is something of a bridge from them to the people who inspire him.

On top of being a writer, Tobar is a professor of English, literary journalism, and Chicano/Latino studies at UC Irvine. His students — and their stories — figure strongly throughout his most recent book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino.’ The author said he learns as much from his students as they do from him.

“Every quarter is a new lesson,” he told LAist. “Every assignment is an education for me.”

Published in 2023, Our Migrant Souls examines the origins of birthright citizenship; the ongoing militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border; and how the spectacle of immigration enforcement in this country relates to racial engineering.

Inspired by the first part of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Tobar wrote the prologue to Our Migrant Souls as a letter to his undergrads.

“You are nineteen, and twenty, and twenty-one,” he writes, “and you are brilliant in the same way your mother and father were.”

Like Baldwin, Tobar set out to explore how “race ideas shape the world around us, and [how they] shape our own perceptions of ourselves,” he said.

In Our Migrant Souls, Tobar also weaves in stories that speak to a desire to honor the hopes and sacrifices of immigrant parents. On one page, the reader learns about a Salvadoran woman named Esperanza Monterrosa, who takes the bus across town every day to work as a housekeeper, so that one day her daughter Cinthia could take the same bus to go to UCLA.

On another page, Tobar shares the story of his aunt, who lived in shame of her teeth, most of which she’d lost during her youth in Guatemala. When her daughter became a dentist, she saw to it that those teeth were replaced and repaired.

When discussing the power of being able to read — everything from books to street signs — Tobar shares that his paternal grandmother was illiterate. Then, he describes the day his father spent a fortune at Pickwick Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, all to buy his son “a big, heavy, hardcover copy of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.”

An outlet to meet the political moment

In conversation with LAist, the author reflected on what his book means under a second Trump administration. Tobar believes that what Latino communities are experiencing is part of a broader transformation. The U.S., he lamented, is in the process of morphing “into a society of a few haves and many, many have-nots.”

“I'm afraid that this state that we find ourselves in is really just the opening chapter of a century of misery,” he added. “One way to resist that is to do what African American people did during Jim Crow, which is to speak out and not accept the seat in the back of the bus. And to protest. I think it's really, really important.”

Tobar also recalled a student he met at Hartnell College in Salinas, “right after the [2024] election,” right before a candidate who promised mass deportations took office.

The young man approached Tobar as he was signing books. He told Tobar he’s undocumented. Then, he asked: “After what's happened, why should I even stay in school?"

Tobar tapped into what he knows about history and replied in earnest: “You can't let [them] determine your future.”

Elevating other authors

This weekend, Tobar will also be part of a panel with author and USC professor Percival Everett, who wrote James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of the enslaved man who also journeyed down the Mississippi.

To prepare for his conversation with Everett, Tobar has been re-reading James and Huck Finn. He’s also been listening to audio versions of Everett’s novels.

“I am not Sydney Poitier is absolutely one of the funniest things I've ever read in my life,” Tobar said. “Listening to it as I drove around Los Angeles, I was just laughing out loud.”