Long before it was one of the most popular tents at the Tucson Festival of Books, Nuestras Raíces was an event of its own, taking place in Jácome Plaza each year.

The Nuestras Raíces Festival was started by Pima County librarians Helen Gutierrez and Anna Sanchez, who attended a Latine festival in Texas and came back determined to do the same thing in Tucson.

“They were really inspired by what was going on there, which was a celebration of Latine art in all its forms, like books, film, artistry. There was a mercadito, there was music,” said Paulina Aguirre-Clinch, a Nuestras Raíces tent organizer since 2010. “And so they loved what was happening there, and they brought that idea back over here, and they started it here.”

When planning for the Tucson Festival of Books began in 2007, Richard Elias, the late Pima County supervisor and a champion for the Pima County Library, insisted that the library should play a role, advocating for Nuestras Raíces to be included.

Since the festival’s first year in 2009, the Nuestras Raíces tent has focused on serving the Latino, Chicano, Mexican American and Spanish-speaking communities in Pima County, according to Hassael Cazessus, another member of the organizing team.

“We're the (only) space that only has exclusively diverse authors, including our Latino and our Indigenous authors,” Cazessus said. “We focus on the intersectionality between our Latin communities and others as well.”

Year after year, the Nuestras Raíces tent has been a staple for Hispanic and local authors presenting at the festival. Last year, the tent hosted a diverse range of speakers, including Tucson historian Lydia R. Otero and first-time author Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez.

Planning the festival is a yearlong process that starts about a month after the festival ends, around May.

Cazessus, Aguirre-Clinch and other team members curate and organize lists year-round, keeping up to date with books from new and established Latino authors, generating “wish lists” and reaching out to invite authors to the festival.

Cazessus said the committee plays an important role in bringing underrepresented voices to the forefront and also works with members of other genres to see where they can share an author and give that person a bigger platform to tell their stories.

“It's really important to attract our community to this event and get them excited, that the authors we have presenting reflect all the different components and all the different ways that people are in our community,” said Executive Director Abra McAndrew. “We're trying to make sure that all of our genres reflect our community.”

Since Hispanic and Indigenous authors often struggle to break into the industry, organizers say the festival’s focus on amplifying the voices of these authors is a natural response.

“It took a while to find people who would listen to the story and not just see it as this kind of interesting little thing, but more seeing it as crucial to the publishing world,” said local author Melani Martinez about her book, “The Molino: A Memoir.”

Martinez was born and raised in Tucson, with her family having deep roots in the community as the owners of El Rapido, a tortilla and tamal store that opened in 1933 in the heart of downtown.

It closed in 2000, just as Martinez began writing her memoir that wouldn’t be published for more than two decades.

Martinez said she wrote the book because she didn’t want people to forget her family’s legacy and their important contribution to Tucson culture and history. But she faced many challenges on her journey to publishing her book, mainly the imposter syndrome she felt in being able to tell her family’s story.

She also faced an uphill battle while actually writing the book.

“Writing full time is a huge privilege, and part of the reason why it took this many years for me to write a book,” she said. “I had to hold a full-time job and be a mom, be a wife, be a sister and a daughter, and I have a lot of other commitments in my life, and that doesn't always offer you the luxury of time and space required for writers.”

It can be incredibly difficult to “put away distractions and really reflect and contemplate things” when there’s a never-ending to-do list waiting in the wings as part of a life that Martinez called “busy, busy, busy.”

Martinez will be a panelist at the festival for the first time this year, with “The Molino” being named one of the Pima County Library’s 2025 Southwest Books of the Year.

“I'm a little bit nervous, but I'm also excited to be able to finally be part of a discourse that I've just only been an outsider of, or I've witnessed but not necessarily been in on the conversation,” she said. “Now I get to be one of the voices in that conversation, in that discourse, so that's both terrifying and exciting.”

Constant rejection is another issue many BIPOC authors face when trying to break into the publishing industry.

“The main thing about getting your stuff published is just persistence,” said Tom Holm, a Cherokee author who published a mystery series and is Pima County Library’s writer in residence. “I was joking with one of my friends about how many rejection slips we have accumulated over the years – enough to fill a wall easily.”

As an Indigenous author, he was never able to find an agent and was tasked with navigating the publishing world mostly on his own. While he’s had many successes in his career, Holm has also faced plenty of rejections and losses.

While working to get “The Osage Rose,” his mystery novel about the Osage murders of the 1920s, published, Holm was repeatedly rejected by publishers and agents.

But when a white author from New York wrote about the same topic, it gained widespread attention, eventually leading to the film “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

“You can write something that you believe is good and everything else, but I really found that white writers, even if they're talking about the same subject, they'll publish more than anybody else,” he said. “It’s not just marginalization, but actually exclusion. They don't really want to publish stuff that's maybe on the verge of being controversial or, you know, giving brown people a voice.”

This will be Holm’ fifth year participating in the festival. He’s attended other book festivals and said Tucson’s truly does give authors of color a space to speak.

He’ll be discussing his new book, “Panther Creek,” a mystery novel that dives into the topic of the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls movement.

Having a story turned into a book is the ultimate form of validation, Martinez said.

“There are very few things that give you the credibility of a story other than actually publishing it in a book,” Martinez said. “There's something about it actually being in a bound book that was published and printed by a publishing company that suddenly takes the credibility of your story into a whole other realm.”

But getting a book to the finish line, especially for authors from marginalized communities, can seem like an endless struggle. Authors contend with rejections, publishing companies and agents that don’t see value in their stories, and their own self-doubt.

“Part of our whole team's efforts is advocating for those authors and those barriers, acknowledging those barriers, and presenting that to our colleagues in the TFOB committees to provide more support to these authors,” said Nuestras Raíces committee member Cazessus.

Another struggle these authors face is the misconception that because they are Latino, their stories should also be about Latinos.

“No, we're all these things. We make up all these beautiful things we should be writing about, you know?” Cazessus said.

Publishing a book leads to opportunities for authors, like speaking at events or becoming subject matter experts.

It also allows community members to build and shape the narrative of their community, allowing for a genuine and raw representation from their perspective.

“If we don't write the story, then someone else is going to write it for us. So we need to document our own testimony,” Martinez said. “We need to have it somewhere in writing, and there's nothing there.”

Susan Barnett is Deputy Editor of Tucson Spotlight and a graduate student at the University of Arizona. She previously worked for La Estrella de Tucson. Contact her at susan@tucsonspotlight.org.

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