Image © Yuyi Morales
Friends, it is Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15). If the term “Hispanic” seems dated to you, well, it is. Hispanic Heritage Month was inaugurated by the Gipper himself, Ronald Reagan, 30 years ago.
Setting aside the desire for alliteration, should Hispanic Heritage Month become Latinx Heritage Month? “Latinx” was coined in an linguistic revolution to include men and women of all races, but also trans, queer, agender, non-binary, gender non-conforming or gender fluid. Explore more here.
The language we use to express race, heritage, and culture evolves within individuals, communities, and, finally (and quite belatedly) becomes adopted by a nation.
“Latinx” was just this month added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but already people that embraced the term are calling for more complexity.
“I am Boricua and I am queer, but not Latinx. To be Latinx, just like Latino, Latina, or Hispanic, is to make invisible the African and the Taíno in me. It erases my ties with the Ixchil people and Lesser Antilles neighbors. It centers my cultural identity around European colonizers…” —Hugo Marín González
Read full essay
Identity is carefully handcrafted by the individual and, in the case of children’s literature, by the author. Children’s literature is a celebration and exploration of identity. We read to experience a character’s journey of becoming and their fight to make sure others name and know them along the way.
When Dreamers author and illustrator Yuyi Morales crossed the Mexican border with her infant son to marry a U.S. Citizen, she was surprised to be named and defined as an “immigrant.”
When Glorieta Magdalena Davis Espinosa in the novelThe Days of the Dead is picked up by ICE, she is not identified as an Espinosa – community leaders since before their town was annexed into America – but as a number as she is put into undocumented child detention.
When Zuri Benitez in the novel Pride watches her neighborhood fall to gentrification when the rich Darcy boys move in, she is forced to define and defend her language and the ways she moves through her world against Ainsley Darcy’s sharp edges. (Read more about Pride and Zuri’s identity below.)
Would these three women see themselves defined within Hispanic Heritage Month? Their identities are richer, broader than that single umbrella and dated term.
Read them. Know them. Let them call themselves what they know they are. You follow suit.
Here is a podcast conversation with Olga Peters of WKVT’s Green Mountain Mornings.
Dreamers
By Yuyi Morales
Illustrated by Yuyi Morales
Published by Holiday House
ISBN-13: 9780823440559
Age Range: 4+
Locate at an Indie Bookstore
Caldecott Honor artist and five-time Pura Belpré Award winner Yuyi Morales tells her own immigration story in this picture-book tribute to the transformative power of hope . . . and reading. An instant New York Times bestseller!
In 1994, Yuyi Morales left her home in Xalapa, Mexico and came to the US with her infant son. She left behind nearly everything she owned, but she didn’t come empty-handed.
She brought her strength, her work, her passion, her hopes and dreams…and her stories. Caldecott Honor artist and five-time Pura Belpré winner Yuyi Morales’s gorgeous new picture book Dreamers is about making a home in a new place. Yuyi and her son Kelly’s passage was not easy, and Yuyi spoke no English whatsoever at the time. But together, they found an unexpected, unbelievable place: the public library. There, book by book, they untangled the language of this strange new land, and learned to make their home within it.
Dreamers is a celebration of what migrantes bring with them when they leave their homes. It’s a story about family. And it’s a story to remind us that we are all dreamers, bringing our own gifts wherever we roam. Beautiful and powerful at any time but given particular urgency as the status of our own Dreamers becomes uncertain, this is a story that is both topical and timeless.
The lyrical text is complemented by sumptuously detailed illustrations, rich in symbolism. Also included are a brief autobiographical essay about Yuyi’s own experience, a list of books that inspired her (and still do), and a description of the beautiful images, textures, and mementos she used to create this book.
A parallel Spanish-language edition, Soñadores, is also available.
Days of the Dead
By Kersten Hamilton
Published by Sky Pony Press
ISBN-13: 9781510728585
Age Range:8+
Locate at an Indie Bookstore
Glorieta Magdalena Davis Espinosa is happy that Papi married Alice. She’s happy that he can smile again after years of mourning Mamá. But the urn containing Mamá’s ashes disappeared into a drawer the day Alice moved in.
If everything about Glorieta’s life is going to change, then she wants one thing to go her way: She wants to hear stories about her mamá when the family gathers on the last night of los Días de los Muertos. And that can only happen if Tia Diosonita will allow Mamá to be buried with the Espinosas in holy ground. If she will allow people to speak Mamá’s name.
With the help of her best friend, River, and her cousin Mateo, Glorieta sets out to convince Diosonita that Mamá is not burning in Hell. To do so, she’ll have to learn to let hate go—and to love the people who stand in her way.
In prose that sparkles with magical undertones, author Kersten Hamilton weaves a tender story about grief, faith, and the redemptive power of love.
Pride
By Ibi Zoboi
Published by HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN-13: 9780062564047
Age Range: 13+
Locate at an Indie Bookstore
Pride and Prejudice gets remixed in this smart, funny, gorgeous retelling of the classic, starring all characters of color, from Ibi Zoboi, National Book Award finalist and author of American Street.
Zuri Benitez has pride. Brooklyn pride, family pride, and pride in her Afro-Latino roots. But pride might not be enough to save her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood from becoming unrecognizable.
When the wealthy Darcy family moves in across the street, Zuri wants nothing to do with their two teenage sons, even as her older sister, Janae, starts to fall for the charming Ainsley. She especially can’t stand the judgmental and arrogant Darius. Yet as Zuri and Darius are forced to find common ground, their initial dislike shifts into an unexpected understanding.
But with four wild sisters pulling her in different directions, cute boy Warren vying for her attention, and college applications hovering on the horizon, Zuri fights to find her place in Bushwick’s changing landscape, or lose it all.
In a timely update of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, critically acclaimed author Ibi Zoboi skillfully balances cultural identity, class, and gentrification against the heady magic of first love in her vibrant reimagining of this beloved classic.
Zuri Benitez continues her fight to self-identify – this time off the page. In a recent and deeply problematic review of Pride in the Wall Street Journal, journalist Meghan Cox Gurdon identified Zuri as Afro-Caribbean when the book jacket itself (and thus author Ibi Zoboi herself) stated that Zuri is Afro-Latino.
By Meghan Cox Gurdon stating, “Her heavy use of slang will undoubtedly amuse and validate those readers ages 13-17 who use it themselves, but it may otherwise limit the book’s appeal,” she misses (to a racist degree) the entire beautiful shout-out of this novel – that Zuri is becoming herself with heritage, with Bushwick, with a sister-rich family, with the love of a boy, and with words, an incredible dance of words.
Read more about Ibi Zoboi’s response.
And, finally, the beauty of identity is that even when people choose a definition, there is actually NO one definition. Watch this!
