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.

Tree Girl

I’m a dreamer. The only one in my family to go to school. My blood is Mayan. Proud. I am Gariela Flores.

I first started climbing trees in Guatemala when I was four. Ever since then, they have been my sanctuary. My home away from home. Now I am fourteen and the day of my quinceanera, the celebration of my passage into womanhood, is approaching quickly. So are the soldiers. War is on its way, and I must find a way to escape its path.

A fictional account of a Guatemalan refugee caught in the war between the government and guerillas. Like so many others, she will fight her way to the Mexican border, searching for herself…and her sister. If you find yourself teaching a unit on Latin America, please find a way to share this book with your students. Ben Mikaelsen’ s account of the savage effects of the wars in Central America on the mind of a young person is not be missed!

Mikaelson, B. (2004). Tree Girl. New York: HarperTempest.

Daniel's Ride

Read this book online at the following website:
http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/BookPreview?bookid=prydnlr_00180001&route=simple_265_0_0_English_0&lang=English&msg=

Meet Daniel. He is just sitting down to breakfast with his family when all of the sudden, the walls start to vibrate and shake. What could be causing it? Is it an earthquake? No way! It’s the stereo system from his brother’s brand spanking new car! Daniel is about to get the ride of his life with the coolest brother in the world!

Sponsored by:

A Library for the World's Children

Please visit the International Children’s Digital Library. You can find it at www.childrenslibrary.org. Here, you can read thousands of storybooks and novels that have been translated into twenty-two different languages! It’s a breeze to find literature from any culture or country to support your social studies and language arts curriculum! Myths, folktales, true stories, children’s books, chapter books, poetry...this site has it all!

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.