Arte Público Press
Arte Público Press is the largest US publishing house , which specializes in contemporary and rediscovered literature that was written by American authors to Hispanics count. The publishing house is based in Houston , Texas . The publisher is part of the University of Houston . The publisher publishes around 30 titles a year.
Arte Público Press was founded in 1979 by Nicolás Kanellos, who is still the publishing director. Just a year later, the publishing house was taken over by the University of Houston, the headquarters of the publishing house is located on the premises that belong to this university. In 1992, Arte Público started the project "Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage" (rediscovery of the Hispanic-American literary heritage). The aim of this project is to find, scientifically appreciate and publish literature by Hispanics that was created between the European settlement of North America and 1960. For example, the publisher published the letters from María Ruiz de Burton . Ruiz de Burton, who died in 1895, is believed to be the first female Mexican American to write in English. In 1994 the publishing house expanded its program to include “Piñata Books”, which is aimed specifically at children and young people. The publisher is also responding to the changing ethnic composition of the US population. In 1950 there were four million Hispanics in the United States. Their number rose from nine million (1970) to around 15 million (1980) and by 2003 to around 45 million (around 13.4% of the total population of the USA).
Works by the following authors have been published, among others: Lamberto Alvarez , Victor Villaseñor , Nicholasa Mohr , Luis Valdez , Miguel Piñero , Sandra Cisneros , Julia Alvarez , Helena Maria Viramontes , Sergio Troncoso , Miguel Algarín , Graciela Limón , Gwendolyn Zepeda , Daniel Olivas , Daniel Chacón , Rubén Medina and José Ángel Gutiérrez . However, Susanne Weingarten also wrote about the publisher that it was a “Hispanic minority program in an honorable mini-publisher”. The books published there do not reach the broad US reading public. The fact that Sandra Cisnero's novel Das Haus in Mango Straße, which is attributed to Chicana literature , was published by the major publishing house Random House after its initial publication by Arte Público Press and thus reached the mainstream , was hailed by literary critics as a major breakthrough in Chicano literature . Sandra Cisneros, for whom first publication on Arte Público Press was the first step to literary fame, said in an interview on National Public Radio on September 19, 1991:
“I don't think I can be happy if I'm the only one published by Random House when there are so many great writers - both Latinos and Latinas or Chicanos and Chicanas - who aren't great in the US Publishing houses are published or are not even known to them. If my success meant that the publishers would take a second look at these writers - and then publish them in large numbers, then we will finally arrive in this country. "
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- ↑ Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita: Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of Maria Amparo Ruíz de Burton , Arte Público Press, Houston 2001
- ↑ Article “Hispanos” in Brockhaus Enzyklopädie , Volume 12, Leipzig and Mannheim 2006
- ↑ Susanne Weingarten: Fresh from the street - SPIEGEL editor Susanne Weingarten on the author Sandra Cisneros . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1992 ( online ).
- ↑ Robin Ganz (1994): Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond , MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) 19 (1): 19–29, doi : 10.2307 / 467785 , p. 27
- ↑ Interview with Tom Vitale on National Public Radio, quoted in Robin Ganz (1994): Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond , MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) 19 (1): 19 -29, doi : 10.2307 / 467785 , p. 27