The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo is a mix of autobiography and novel written by Chicano lawyer and activist Oscar Zeta Acosta. In this 1972 coming-of-age book, Acosta tells the story of his life: his birth in El Paso, growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and becoming a lawyer with the reputation for taking on impossible cases and challenging the status quo.

Jesus Colon’s 1961 collection of essays and other short pieces, A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches, reflects his concern for the working class. Some of the pieces are autobiographical.

Ernesto Galarza’s fictionalized autobiography, Barrio Boy, tells of the author’s birth in Mexico and his years-long migration to California during the Mexican Revolution. In the 1971 book, the author is orphaned but manages to graduate from high school and, like Rodriguez, to attend Stanford University.

Written in 1950, Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude explores the Mexican psyche through an examination of political power in post-conquest Mexico. Paz, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for Literature, argues for democracy in this book, a stance that placed him at odds with Mexican leaders at the time it was written but won him kudos for his social criticism.

Richard Rodriguez followed Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez with another collection of autobiographical essays entitled Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. This 1992 book was not as well-received as his first work, but Rodriguez expands his subject matter to include the AIDS epidemic, his homosexuality, and the history of California and Mexico.