Dreams in Times of War / Soñar en tiempos de guerra
Oswaldo Estrada, translated by Sarah Pollack

In Dreams in Times of War / Soñar en tiempos de guerra, Oswaldo Estrada invites readers into the intimate spaces of Latinx immigrant life with a collection of twelve bilingual (English and Spanish) short stories that are as vulnerable as they are unflinching. The stories move across geographies and generations, from the street vendors and schoolchildren of Lima to the home care aides and college freshmen in the American South. All of this, in a way that brings together portraits of loss, resilience, and a deep hunger for dignity and human connection.

Estrada’s gift in this book is not simply in portraying the immigrant experience but in paying attention to its emotional layers. His characters—nannies, undocumented gardeners, queer youth, aging caregivers—are not framed as symbols or social issues but as people struggling to navigate different forms of violence (political, domestic, structural) while still making sure there is room for kindness. Stories like “The Weed Whacker” and “Assisted Living” explore the workload of everyday labor and longing, they show how love, shame, and exhaustion can coexist in the same breath.

Many of the stories work in quiet counterpoint to dominant narratives of immigration. “Dreams in Times of War,” the opening story, looks at the tension between fantasy and disillusionment, between the dream of the “making it in the U.S.” and the psychological cost of leaving this space. The narrative is certainly informed by Estrada’s own lived experiences, and the result is as emotionally powerful as it can get. The prose is clean and always alert to the small gestures that build what we call life: a lemon candy pressed into a child’s hand, or a red string tied around the wrist before a transcontinental flight.

What sets this collection apart is Estrada’s attention to care. Not just caregiving, though that is a recurring theme, but the care with which each story is crafted. There is tenderness in his words for those who society considers to be in the margins—especially women and gender-nonconforming characters—who carry the weight of others’ survival. And yet, even in the bleakest stories, Estrada never abandons his characters. He doesn’t leave them alone. There is always a glimpse of community, of improvisational joy, of dreaming beyond the social construct of borders.
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Presented in both English and Spanish, the bilingual format is not just a stylistic choice but an ethical one. It honors the linguistic and cultural multiplicity of the people represented in the book and allows for readers across generations and borders to engage with the text directly.

Estrada, who was born in the U.S. but raised in Peru and later returned to California as a teenager, writes with the voice of the person who understands the permanent hyphenation of living between nations, between languages, between “making it in the U.S.” and feeling lost in the world, between the roles of witness and participant. His background as a scholar and advocate for Latinx and Latin American voices feeds this book, but the stories never feel academic. They are lived, felt, and fiercely human.

Dreams in Times of War / Soñar en tiempos de guerra is a collection that matters—not just for what it reveals about the current Latinx immigrant lives, but for how it reveals them: with compassion and literary intelligence. This is storytelling that crosses not only borders but barriers of silence.

Dreams in Times of War / Soñar en tiempos de guerra is a publication by the University of New Mexico Press (2025).
Reviewed ​by
Héctor Rendón
​8/6/2025
Héctor "Vale" Rendón (Mazatlán, México) is a publisher, writer, academic, and journalist. He currently works as Assistant Professor at Washington State University. He has written three novels and has lived in five different countries. As a journalist, he has worked for more than a decade as editor, foreign correspondent, TV reporter, multimedia reporter, and editor-in-chief for several media outlets. His main areas of academic study are focused on media narratives about minorities in different social contexts. Throughout his life he has received several awards and grants that support both his academic and creative work.
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