A New Chapter on Cultural Pride

Dick and Jane and their dog, Spot, have nothing on Pepita, Pablo and Rita. Sure, the brother-sister team and their favorite spaniel have charmed readers for decades as they frolicked on an immaculate street behind their white picket fence. Their adventures sparkle with postwar childhood innocence and celebrated the American Dream.

But could Dick and Jane speak two languages like Pepita, the feisty heroine of “Pepita Talks Twice” who rejects her family’s native Spanish only to learn, in the end, the worthiness of a second language? Could they bake Mexican-style bagels like Pablo, the loving son in Natasha Wing’s “Jalapeno Bagels” whose father is Jewish and mother is Mexican?

Could they relate to Rita, the spirited girl in “Salsa,” who lives in a Puerto Rican barrio in New York City and dreams of playing in a salsa orchestra while bouncing seamlessly from one culture to another, never landing completely on either side of the hyphen?

Umm, no.

In their “all-American” world, Dick and Jane, and scores of literary children like them, never met brown-skinned kids who dream of living in larger homes with fewer people, who choose silence over speaking English with thick accents, or who shake their shoulders to the beat and yell, “Ay bendito!” like Lillian Colon-Vila’s Rita.

But today they might.

For the first time, young Latinos of all ages can find books in stores, libraries and their classrooms about children who live in two worlds but no longer feel torn. These bilingual children do not have to look far from their neighborhoods to find the voices of writers who use and understand language in their particular way: English prose that expresses American ideas in the rhythmic cadences of Spanish.

This growing children’s market is predicted to boom in the next decade as commercial publishers follow the lead of smaller, nonprofit presses that have produced the works of about a dozen Latino writers for the past decade. But, already, the demand is clear in bilingual education programs across the country, and even in some mainstream reading and literature classes where teachers are increasingly using Latino writers to turn children on to the world of words.

“When I grew up in El Paso, we read about Dick and Jane and their white picket fence, and I always thought to myself, ‘What does this have to do with me?’ ” said Raymund Paredes, associate vice chancellor for academic development at UCLA and a scholar of Latino literature. “I didn’t know anybody like them. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I was exposed to literature about people like me.”

That is, literature about the millions of people who live in English and Spanish simultaneously, who have ties to a foreign culture but are thriving--or at least surviving--in the United States. To reach them, publishers say, it is not enough to translate English-language books or to import the literature of Spanish-speaking countries.

“For our children, the world of Dick and Jane and middle-class suburbia is a big leap, as it is also a big leap to ask them to relate to stories about mid-century villages in Mexico,” said Nicolas Kanellos, founder of Arte Public Press at the University of Houston.

Gary Soto’s Chicano-themed stories, for example, particularly move ninth-grader Nikkie Gonzales because they reflect her own childhood. Soto, winner of the 1999 Hispanic Heritage Award in literature, was the first Mexican-American writer to publish for young adults.

Writers Relate to ‘Average People’

“There’s something to learn from any book,” said 15-year-old Gonzales, who attends Bell Gardens High School. “But someone like Emily Dickinson lived a totally different life than mine. Gary Soto grew up the same way I did. His stories talk about what’s going on with us. They started like us--average people.”

School districts from California to Texas, and Florida to New York, are not abandoning traditional literature or the classics; they are simply incorporating authors whose works are relevant to the multicultural experiences of their students. The books are not typically required by school districts but are found on the individual reading lists of teachers who say there is plenty of room to teach Shakespeare and Soto, Dickinson and Francisco Alarcon.

Even “in places like North Carolina, they’re preparing to deal with the children of migrant workers who are settling down,” said Bob Langdon, sales and marketing director for Children’s Book Press. “These stories are pulled right out of their communities.”

First-graders, for example, can relate to Juan Felipe Herrera’s “The Upside Down Boy,” the story of Juanito, a Mexican immigrant who is bewildered by his new surroundings and whose tongue “feels like a rock” when he tries to speak English. Teenagers can identify with Esperanza, the central figure of Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street” who complains that at school “they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth.”

“The content of my poems is the family, the neighborhood, the abuelitas [grandmothers], the corn tortillas, the chile,” said Alarcon, the director of Spanish for Native Speakers program at UC Davis. “It’s part of the vocabulary of the daily life of kids, and it’s like a little mirror they can relate to. When you don’t see your own images through the media or in books, you start thinking you’re weird, and your self-esteem gets bruised.”

For the nonprofit Arte Publico Press and Children’s Book Press in San Francisco, publishing tales and poems about bicultural characters is a labor of love. Yet each sold more than $1 million in books last year, and both are seeing surges in the demands for Latino works, particularly from schools and libraries. Commercial houses are now paying attention to the lucrative allure of the market. Many are signing up children’s authors or encouraging well-known novelists like Julia Alvarez and Denise Castillo to create stories that captivate younger readers.

“If you look across the board at the big houses, there is a real upswing of publishers trying to respond to the needs of the bicultural readers,” said Andrea Cascardi, associate publishing director of Knopff & Crown in New York.

As a result, Latino children have more choices than ever.

Creating a ‘New Kind of Reader’

“This is the first generation that has access to all of these books,” said Anita Cano, owner of Cultura Latina Bookstore in Long Beach and a Spanish professor at Long Beach City College. “We’re creating a new kind of reader, a child who will read world literature but will start with his own.”

“Pepita Talks Twice” evolved from the author’s childhood in Los Angeles. As the only U.S.-born child in her family, Ofelia Dumas Lachtman whispered translations to her Mexican mother as they watched American movies. In the book, Pepita tires of being the neighborhood interpreter and vows never to speak Spanish again--until she must do so to save the life of her beloved dog.

When Lachtman, of Westchester, reads the story to children, she always asks them if it’s hard work translating for the adults in their lives.

“They all nod, and you can see the self-esteem growing in them,” said Lachtman, 81, “Where before they might have thought they were weird because they spoke another language. What I think is really wonderful is that even the children who are not Latino can relate to her. She feels the way they feel and, through her, they see more samenesses in our cultures than differences.”

In Los Angeles, Sierra Park Elementary School kindergarten teacher Nedra Bickel swears by Pepita’s crisis. Her class of 16 Latinos and Asians are all bilingual 5-year-olds who “grasp the significance of her dilemma,” said Bickel, who recently read the book to them for the second time.

Little Teresa Hernandez was thrilled to listen to Pepita’s travails again because “she’s funny.” But when prodded, the Mexican-American revealed there is more to her affection for the character. Teresa translates for Bickel during parent-teacher conferences and helps her grandmother with the English words she does not understand. Pepita’s story is the story of her life.

“That really sends goose bumps up my arms,” Lachtman says. “That’s what I want these books to do.”

That sense of relevance is especially important for children and teenagers who constantly measure themselves against the mainstream, said Mari Womack, a professor of cultural anthropology at UCLA Extension.

“‘Children can grow up with a strong, powerful culture in the home, but if they don’t have that validated in the classroom, they start to feel that in order to fit in they have to leave their culture behind,” Womack said.

Motivation in Poetry

Alarcon, the poet, uses his gift to motivate Latino children to embrace their heritage. His last collection of children’s poems, “Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems,” celebrates his Mexican-American upbringing in Los Angeles.

Through an online outreach program developed by Children’s Book Press, Alarcon teaches children across the nation to write their own verses by using their five senses. The children share drafts of their poems; he, in turn, lets them critique his works in progress.

In New York’s Spanish Harlem, teacher Phyllis Tashlik used works by Latino authors to encourage her eighth-grade girls to chronicle their own feelings. After two years of writing and revising, the teacher surprised her class with “Hispanic, Female and Young: An Anthology,” a compilation of the students’ writings published by Arte Publico Press in 1994.

At Bell Gardens High School, teacher Natalia Vargas and Gigi Cronin, a visiting creative writing teacher, hope that stories by Cisneros and Luis J. Rodriguez will resonate in the hearts and minds of a ninth-grade class.

Their assignment: to write 32-page picture books about their own names, which they will share with elementary school children. But, first, Cronin knows she must get them hooked.

She reads Rodriguez’s story of a Mexican girl, named America, who refuses to express herself in her Chicago school because she overhears her teacher referring to her as “an illegal.”

“How can a girl called America not belong in America?” the girl in the story asks.

Cronin’s students are mesmerized. All 24, mostly boys, listen attentively for the ending. One girl has tears in her eyes.

Cronin continues. A Puerto Rican poet in the story encourages America to express herself on paper: “When you use words to share feelings with somebody else, you are a poet, and poets belong to the whole world.”

By the end of the story, America has found her voice in poetry. By the end of the lesson, the students apparently have also. Eagerly, they write their first drafts.

“That’s very touching and it’s so true,” said 15-year-old Maggie Gallardo. “I was in Disneyland recently with my family, and I heard white people talking about why don’t we go back to where we came from? I hate that. It’s like it says in the story, we are where we came from. Those stories help us be proud of where we came from.”