Book bans in the United States are accelerating across schools and libraries, disproportionately targeting Latino and LGBTQ+ authors, according to PEN America.
Literary censorship in the United States has reached unprecedented levels.
“Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books,” warns a report by PEN America, which also points out that this suppression of titles extends to the federal government under Donald Trump.
In another analysis, published in February, the century-old writers’ organization denounced that more than a third (36 percent) of all banned books feature characters or people of color, including Latinos. MILENIO tells you which ones and who they are.
For example, works by renowned Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera), Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits), and Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate), Chicano authors Rudolfo Anaya (Bless Me, Ultima) and Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street), and even non-fiction works like biographies of Frida Kahlo and Celia Cruz, and Paul Ortiz’s An African American and Latino History of the United States, were banned in school districts and even at the state level for content deemed “inappropriate,” such as sexual references or critiques of capitalism and colonialism.
Similarly, a quarter of the banned titles feature LGBTQ+ people or characters, such as Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and The Lesbian’s Guide to Catholic School, by Mexican-American authors Benjamin Alire Sáenz and Sonora Reyes.
Overall, the most frequently banned books of the past year have been works by Stephen King, Ellen Hopkins, Sarah J. Maas, Jodi Picoult, and Yusei Matsui.
In public libraries, the American Library Association (ALA) reports that, in compliance with anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) directives issued by President Trump, authorities are carrying out mass removals of titles from federal institutions such as the Nimitz Library at the Naval Academy and Department of Defense schools. This affects texts on ethnicities and minorities, such as Latino perspectives, as well as those on LGBTQ+ issues.
To emphasize the unprecedented and extreme situation being imposed in the United States, PEN America opened its report, “The Normalization of Book Banning,” with a striking paragraph:
“Never before in the lifetime of any American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country. Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate book banning, including statewide bans on specific titles.
“Never before have so many politicians attempted to pressure school principals to censor books according to their ideological preferences, even threatening to withhold public funds to enforce compliance.” By censorship, the report refers to the imposition of measures that prevent, even temporarily, students from accessing a book because of its content. This includes titles labeled “restricted,” which are only accessible with parental permission or if students are enrolled in certain grades or educational levels.
In the last year alone, between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025, PEN America It recorded 6,870 incidents of book censorship in 45 states and 451 school districts. This brings the total number of cases to 23,000 since July 2021, marking “the fourth school year of the contemporary campaign to ban books, and illustrating the ongoing attacks on books, stories, identities, and narratives.”
Bans on diversity, equity and inclusion may halt Latino progress in higher education
