Red Hot Salsa

To be young and Latino.

To be young and American.

How do you keep your identity when you are torn between two or more cultures? As Raquel Valle Senties put it:

“My heart has no room for two countries as [my heart] has no room for two lovers.”

These are the stories of Mexican and Latin American teens, trying to figure out who they are. Told from the mouths of 28 influential Latino and Mexican American poets, whose poems were especially picked in a struggle to portray every aspect of bilingual life. Poems appear in both English and Spanish. In her translations, Carlson fuses the romance and passion of the Spanish language with the candidness of English. The result is vibrant flow of words, colored by well-known Spanish phrases and cognates. The poems are centered around five themes: language and identity, home, love, family, and victory. The resounding idea is the freedom that comes from a sense of cultural belonging.

In the words of Luis J. Rodriguez:

“Here you have a way. Here you can sing victory.”

Carlson, L.M. (Ed.). (2005). Red hot salsa: Bilingual poems on being young and Latino in The United States (L. M. Carlson., Trans.). New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Gathering The Sun

A Pura Belprie Award Winning Book!

M is for Mexico.

My grandparents came from Mexico.
My parents returned to Mexico.
My dream is to visit Mexico.

Y tu?

What's your dream?

Follow the lives of these young children as they take you into the heart of Mexican culture. With rich, vibrant pictures and poems in both english and spanish, you'll be able to see just what it's like to belong to a culture rich in tradition, family, language, and love. It's amazing that this book can take something as simple as learning the alphabet, and effortlessly turn it into a stepping stone for so many other things.

Keep the culture of your bilingual students alive in the classroom. Let them share this tale with you, their peers, or simply keep it around as a reminder of something familiar. Believe me, having bilingual books on hand goes a long way in reaching across the gap to meet the needs of students who have a harder time staying afloat.

Ada, A. F. (1994). Gathering the sun: An alphabet in English and Spanish. Trans. Rosa Zubizaretta. New York, NY: Lothrop, Lee, & Shepard Books.

I'm Dead At Recess

Please visit the following link to view the book on the Tumblebooks Library Website:
http://www.tumblebooks.com/library/asp/full_book.asp?ProductID=2

Tumblebooks are online interactive storybooks. They feature narrated read alouds, an interactive story pad where you can follow along as the words are being read, as well as animated graphics and illustrations which bring your favorite characters to life.

If your kids act up like mine do, then here's the perfect story for them. Told in poetic verse, it's a terror-filled rhyme of how one boy's antics cause him to live in fear as he counts down the hours to his demise. Once your kids get a load of this, they may think twice about getting out of line.