CHAPTER 7
Our goal for this critical multicultural analysis of children’s books about Mexican American migrant farmworkers is to work toward a discursive leveling of texts; that is, reading these texts alongside literary and cultural criticism, and consulting other secondary sources. Reading these books against a broader historical, sociopolitical context will re/contextualize them and make visible the social implications of these texts.
In this analysis, we read books against the historical and sociopolitical context of migrant work in the United States (see Chapter 5). We historicize current representations of Mexican American migrant workers within the developments of the Mexican American experience as it is rendered in children’s literature (see Chapter 5). Since many of these titles fall under the genre of realistic fiction, we consider how this genre textually reconstructs reality. We also consider the nonfiction narrative because, as readers, we need to challenge how accurately factual stories represent reality.
Through critical multicultural analysis, we analyze how power is exercised among the characters along a continuum of domination to agency. We connect these microinteractions among characters to the power relations of class, race, and gender.
The following critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature about Mexican American migrant farmworkers involves the examination of a text collection juxtaposed with the historical and sociopolitical context of Mexican American participation in the U.S. migrant agricultural labor system. It also considers the historical and sociopolitical context of Mexican American representation in children’s literature, as well as the social and discursive constructions of genres, characters, and story closures.
Many of the characters in the books we studied hope to leave their poverty behind at the U.S./Mexican border. Readers can investigate what social power relations the characters immigrate into in the “land of opportunity.”
A Critical Multicultural Analysis of the Text Collection
The study of children’s literature is a social practice that can produce, reproduce, and circulate dominant cultural meanings as well as resist and subvert these prevailing ideologies. Children’s literature invites readers to contend with power relations through its thick description of who we are and how we are organized as a society. Critical multicultural analysis of The Circuit and other titles in our text collection highlights that all literature is culturally coded; authors and readers are discursively, socially, and historically constructed; and that reading is a sociopolitical activity. Critical multicultural analysis disrupts fixed and bounded notions of culture, identity, class, race, gender, and power. It illuminates these social processes.
Critical multicultural analysis creates a space for adults and children alike to recognize their discursive constitution, as well as providing a site for resistance, subversion, and transformation of dominant class, race, and gender ideologies. Reading class, race, and gender in children’s literature leads to reading how power is exercised in society. It calls into question the subject positions offered by the dominant discourses imbedded into children’s books. A critical multicultural analysis of books about Mexican American migrant farmworkers explores how power is exercised and circulated in these stories by looking at how characters dominate, collude, resist, and show agency; it is a critical multicultural reading of the social myth of the American Dream.
Reconsidering Publishing Practices
Our text collection consists of 26 titles, published from 1992 to 2005. The stories are targeted at children from age 5 to young adult. The genres represented include nonfiction narratives, picture books that draw on the nonfiction genre, and realistic fiction, ranging from picture books to young adult novels. Numerous titles are autobiographical in origin.
Ten authors (Ancona, Ada, Dorros, Hart, Herrera, Jiménez, Mora, Rivera, Soto, and Viramontes) identify as members of the Mexican American culture and/or speakers of the Spanish language. Nine authors (Altman, Atkins, Brimner, Bunting, DeFelice, Hoyt-Goldsmith, Olson, Paulsen, and Pérez) are European American. Pam Muñoz Ryan is of Mexican- and European-American heritage. European American authors wrote and took the photographs for the nonfiction narratives, with the exception of Harvest, which is written and photographed by George Ancona, whose heritage is Mexican American. Eight illustrators are of Latina/o heritage.
Small independently owned publishers such as Lee & Low, Children’s Book Press, Arte Público Press, Bilingual Press, and University of New Mexico Press produced nine of the stories; conglomerate-owned publishers created seventeen of the texts. Houghton Mifflin, a member of The Blackstone Group, takes the leadership in publishing about Mexican American migrant farmworkers. They published Jiménez’s two chapter books, two Spanish translations of these stories, and two picture books based on the author’s first book, The Circuit. One of Jiménez’s picture books is in bilingual text and the other has a Spanish edition. Most texts garnered culturally specific awards (e.g., Pura Belpré, Tomás Rivera, and Américas awards), thus bringing national recognition to these texts.
Analyzing the Text Collection
We have woven in book reviews and other texts about the texts. We have organized the text analyses by publishing date within the genre whenever relevant, because these texts are, in many ways, responses to each other. (See Appendix E for a chart of the publishing practices associated with this text collection.) How the power relations of class, race, and gender are enacted in children’s literature about Chicana/o migrant farmworkers is the central question guiding this analysis. In addition, we consider the following questions:
· In what ways are the cultural themes imbedded in these texts constructed by these power relations?
· In what ways do the genre(s) and focalization shape how power is represented in each text?
· How do the characters exercise power?
· We have taken care to analyze the story ending as well: is it open or closed? Does it confirm, disrupt, speculate upon, or question the class, gender, and race ideologies imbedded in the text?
Generic considerations guide much of our analysis.
The text collection overturns the stereotypes often associated with the working poor, such as “lazy, uneducated, unlucky, abusive, dirty, immoral, criminal tendencies, and undisciplined,” as Maria José and our colleagues Jane Kelley and Cynthia Rosenberger (Kelley, Rosenberger & Botelho, 2005) found when they examined the representation of poverty in children’s literature. The text collection shows characters who are resourceful, resilient, and family-minded, and whose responses are products of their lived experience. These children’s books show how the characters exercise power within the specific historical and sociopolitical conditions of the migrant agricultural labor system.
The following cultural themes emerged from the particular power circumstances of the migrant farmworker system in the United States.
Cultural Themes
Critical multicultural analysis of the text collection foregrounds the following cultural themes:
· maintaining family bonds (family);
· negotiating Chicano/a/Mexican American/Mexican identity (identity);
· accessing formal schooling (education);
· learning English language and literacy (English language learning);
· including and maintaining the Spanish language (language);
· reflecting on undocumented and documented immigration (immigration);
· reconsidering migrant agricultural labor (work); and,
· establishing a sense of place (home).
These themes are cultural because the meanings are not locked in the words but come from particular historical and sociopolitical circumstances, shaped by the power relations of gender, class, and race. The cultural themes of education, language, and English language learning are central to this text collection.
Education/Language/Identity – Language and identity are central issues within the school context. The process of deculturalization, or the stripping away of one’s culture, as Joel Spring (2004) documents in his historical research on underrepresented cultural groups in the United States, is evident in the characters’ school experiences as they struggle to keep their first language, Spanish. According to Spring, the compulsory education law is not always enforced for Chicana/o children. He considers this lack of implementation one of the most discriminatory acts against this population of children. He further argues that the migrant worker system, initiated by U.S. farmers, contributes to the segregation of this cultural group. Spring maintains that language is the place where Mexican Americans, like other linguistically diverse groups, resist deculturalization policies and practices.
In the text collection, the incompatibility between school and migrant work is present, with migrant farm work taking precedence because families economically depend on their children’s contributions to their livelihood. In many instances, according to Spring, “racism serves as a justification for economic exploitation” (Spring, 2004: 82). In the children’s books these cultural themes are entangled with the discursive threads of power. Schools are the central context where characters’ identities are constructed and contested.
The characters also exist in the U.S. diaspora, an experience contributing to their transnational identity formation. Anthropologist James Clifford (1997) explains: “the language of diaspora is increasingly invoked by displaced peoples who feel (maintain, revive, invent) a connection with a prior home” (Clifford, 1997: 310). Many of the characters possess a strong connection with Mexico, a relationship that shapes their identity in combination with their present community associations in the United States.
Family/Work – The text collection demonstrates how the migrant agricultural system, largely influenced by the power relations of class, race, and gender, greatly contributes to organization of the families in these stories. Race, class, and gender power relations can disrupt family and community systems, while some families organize, reorganize, and show resiliency and resourcefulness in response to these oppressive circumstances. The discursive threads of resiliency and resourcefulness are collective forms of power.
As analytical readers of these stories, we question whether it is socially just for families to endure poverty. While we all should be resilient and resourceful, especially as we exercise our power against dominant ideologies, these ways of being should not be left with the individual or family. We can connect these ways of exercising power to race/class/gender relations. There is a danger of isolating families’ responses to poverty, that is, casting them as models of resiliency and resourcefulness, because it dislocates their experiences from the historical and sociopolitical conditions that shaped their living circumstances in the first place. Poverty is violence against children and their families. Children’s literature scholar Eliza T. Dresang (1997) cautions readers:
Does the presence of a fictional child who develops the inner strength to deal with a violent or potentially violent situation negate the apparent radicalism of writers who include topics once tacitly forbidden in children’s texts? Do these books masquerade as different while using only a veneer of violence to overlay a content closely resembling the pastoralism of their predecessors?
(Dresang, 1997: 133)
In looking at the migrant agricultural labor system, we consider how farm work shapes these families as well as how these families reorganize to take collective action against this system of social inequities.
The text collection represents a range of gender relations within the family, but certainly the machismo of the father and unconditional love of the mother are present in some of the texts. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary [2000], the word machismo originates from Mexican Spanish meaning “the quality of being macho, manliness, male virility, or masculine pride, or the display of this.” When the machismo of the father leads to family instability, the mothers in some of the texts play a key role of keeping the family together. Chicano social scientist Manuel Gonzales (1999) warns that focusing on the authoritarian male, prevalent in studies about the Mexican family, leads to a “familial deficiency model” (Gonzales, 1999: 237). In general, these texts show interdependence between fathers and mothers, both working together and, in some cases, alongside their children to earn an income that will provide for the basic needs of the family. The text collection represents a community of heterogeneous families who live a diverse range of migrant experiences.
While all the parents are not formally schooled beyond grade 4, most of the families encourage their children to do well in school. These school experiences take the children further away from what the families know. Some of the characters devalue what parents know (e.g. knowledge related to the harvest cycle) and try to disassociate themselves from this knowledge. They understand too well the knowledge that has currency in the dominant culture; they are aware of the power/knowledge nexus. Some of the child protagonists try hard to succeed in school culture and at school literacies.
Immigration/Home – The border is present in most of these texts; it is like another character. The border signifies the geopolitical circumstances the characters immigrate into as well as the socioeconomic factors that influenced the border crossing. In his study of travel and movement in children’s literature, John S. Butcher (2002) maintains that the push and pull and “the bright lights” influences, which contributed to this transnational movement, offer “the promise of a better opportunity” (p. 152). In the text collection, documented and undocumented immigration are represented against class and race relations in both Mexico and the United States. The families organize to make a homeplace for themselves, but the migrant circuit disrupts their efforts. These cultural themes (education/language/identity, family/work, and immigration/home) permeate the books by Francisco Jiménez.
Visiting The Circuit
Francisco Jiménez2 has written four books about his family’s experiences as migrant workers in the United States. The title story of The Circuit was initially written for adults and later reprinted in a couple of young adult short-story anthologies. More recently, it was published in “Some Consequences of Racial, Gender, and Class Inequality” in Race, Class, and Gender in the United States by Paula Rothenberg (2004). La Mariposa and The Christmas Gift/El Regalo de Navidad, two short stories from The Circuit, have been adapted and published as picture books. The characters are three-dimensional, their situation is realistic, and the conditions of the migrant work are conveyed with precision.
In the late 1940s, Papá dreamed of the long trek north: “cross la frontera, enter California, and leave our poverty behind.” (Jiménez, 1997, p. 1). Thus the Jiménez family, Papá, Mamá, Roberto, and Panchito, crossed the Mexican/U.S. border in hopes of finding better living conditions as migrant workers. The family moves with the harvests of cotton, strawberries, and grapes, and the agricultural work of thinning lettuce and topping carrots. Depending on the needs and circumstances of the family, Mamá maintains the babies and the camp or contributes monetarily by picking, or cleaning and cooking for other farmworkers. Panchito and Roberto contribute to the family’s livelihood. The two brothers’ school attendance is disrupted by the harvest cycle: just when Panchito makes friends with one of his classmates, he has to move on; at one point when he develops a close relationship with a teacher, he has to move on; finally, when he becomes more comfortable with English, he has to move on.
La migra, the border patrol, is a constant shadow in their daily lives. The fear of deportation is real. Papá constantly reminds the boys that they must say that they were born in California. “Don’t tell anyone,” he instructs his sons, “even friends can turn you in.” Even though foreshadowing is seeded throughout the book, the ending, where they are captured and deported, comes as a shock to the reader.
The Circuit tells of hard, hard times, love and resilience, and generosity of spirit. Simply classifying The Circuit as a multicultural children’s book without analysis essentializes migrant farmworkers, the Mexican American family, and the author as insider. The factors that cause this family’s poverty are complex. Approaching children’s literature about Chicana/o migrant farmworkers with interest and respect is important but not sufficient.
According to Stephens (1992), one way the first-person narrative constructs a worldview is by “situating readers in a subject position effectively identical with that of the narrator, so that readers share the narrator’s view of the world” (Stephens, 1992: 57). In this realistic, young adult novel, the narrator, Panchito brings us close to the socioeconomic circumstances of his family and the communities they find themselves in, and describes the condition of migrant work. Reading The Circuit only as a multicultural text may foster an unquestioned identification with the focalizer or the narrator, in this case, which makes the reader vulnerable to the ideological dimensions of the text. Stephens maintains that this kind of reading is “pedagogically irresponsible” (Stephens, 1992: 68). Critical multicultural analysis offers strategies for examining texts from “estranged subject positions” and rejecting simple identification with the main character(s).
Jiménez comments on the reasons why he wrote these stories:
I wrote them to chronicle part of my family’s history but, more importantly, to voice the experiences of a large sector of our society that has been frequently ignored. Through my writing I hope to give readers an insight into the lives of migrant farmworkers and their children whose back-breaking labor of picking fruits and vegetables puts food on our tables. Their courage and struggles, hopes and dreams for a better life for their children and their children’s children give meaning to the term “American dream.” Their story is the American story.
(Jiménez, 1997: 115–116)
Jiménez is responding to the invisibility of migrant agricultural workers in everyday life, the sociopolitical landscape, and children’s literature, especially Mexican American representation in children’s and young adult books.
In leaving their poverty behind at the U.S./Mexican border, the story’s characters slip into the American Dream. While Papá challenges the discourse layers of this social myth, in the end, he still believes in some aspects of its promise. Mamá defers their future to God’s will. The American Dream lures this family, but their initial experiences in California defy its guarantees. While this short story collection offers “a wonderful representation of a culture that exists in the U.S. but is foreign to most Americans” (Ginsberg, 1998: n.p.), as readers, we can read these stories against the migrant work system that has a hold on this culture and how it controls this family’s everyday experiences.
In the short story, “Learning the Game,” Panchito describes how power is exercised within the contratista system. Panchito witnesses how Díaz, the brutal foreman maltreats Gabriel, a migrant farmworker, and learns a lesson from Gabriel’s resistance against Díaz’s oppressive work practices. In the end, Gabriel does lose his job, with real economic ramifications for him and his family back in Mexico. Gabriel took a great risk in resisting Díaz’s dehumanizing practices and internalized oppression because the way he does business as a contratista is structurally supported by the migrant labor system. As a result of Gabriel’s resistance Panchito learns to be an ally to Manuelito, a younger boy who lives in his camp, when Carlos, the camp bully, excludes Manuelito from the group. Panchito declines to play with Carlos:
“If Manuelito doesn’t play, I won’t either,” I said. As soon as I said it, my heart started pounding. My knees felt weak. Carlos came right up to me. He had fire in his eyes. “Manuelito doesn’t play!” he yelled.
… He stuck his right foot behind my feet and pushed me. I fell flat on my back. My brothers rushed over to help me up. “You can push me around, but you can’t force me to play!” I yelled back, dusting off my clothes and walking away.
… After a few moments, he cocked his head back, spat on the ground, and swaggered toward us, saying, “OK, Manuelito can play.”
(Jiménez, 1997: 77–78)
While Gabriel interrupts Díaz’s domination, he is pushed out of “the game” of the migrant labor system. Panchito disrupts the oppressive cycle created by the camp bully. He refuses to collude with “the game” of domination and emulates Gabriel’s resistance.
The Circuit ends abruptly. Panchito’s memorization of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is juxtaposed ironically with the beginning of the deportation process of the Jiménez family. Hardworking undocumented immigrants do not have the same rights as other workers. The Circuit invites the reader to re-examine equality; to question a government that preys on undocumented immigrants and condones substandard living conditions for migrant agricultural workers; to consider the dilemmas of education and child labor on a local and national level; to rethink U.S. immigration policies and their impact not only on undocumented immigrants, but also on the U.S. economy and food supply; and, to consider definitions of poverty and sociopolitical status versus individual responsibility for meeting the basic needs of all people. The hegemony of English as the language of social power contributes to the marginalization of Panchito’s family.
The Christmas Gift/El Regalo de Navidad, based on the short story by the same name, is told in third-person narrative point of view, a shift from the first-person perspective of The Circuit from which it was drawn. It is almost Christmas and Panchito hopes against hope that he will receive his very own red ball as a gift. But it is not to be. Instead, he and his siblings receive bags of candy, all that his parents can afford. The only “extravagance” is an embroidered handkerchief for Mamá that Papá purchases for ten cents to help a young couple, who go from door to door, asking for help. In an act of thoughtfulness and understanding, Panchito genuinely thanks his parents for their gift.
It is noteworthy that the author changed the ending of the original story as it appeared in The Circuit and, for the picture book, added Panchito’s ability to let go of his personal desires. In the picture book, the ending is closed, whereas in the short story, it is left open. The ending of The Christmas Gift/El Regalo de Navidad conflates the “spirit of Christmas” with the harsh socioeconomic conditions lived by Panchito’s family. The spirit of Christmas dictates “making do” with what one has, but this family can barely provide for the basic needs of its members. The unresolved ending of the short story version calls attention to this family’s situation and invites the reader to wonder about the social factors that constructed these conditions.
The setting and circumstances are more evident in The Christmas Gift/El Regalo de Navidad. Panchito and his family (mother, father, and four siblings), along with the other migrant workers, must move on from their unsuccessful stint at picking cotton. The weather has been too damp, and they have been eating only because of a kind and generous butcher who sells them meaty bones. In one illustration spread, a shopper chooses select fruit and vegetables from an outdoor grocery store stand, and on the other side of the fence, Panchito and Mamá salvage vegetables and fruit from the trash receptacles behind the grocery store.
Another fence divides a grower’s property, a quilted agricultural landscape, from the small tent dwellings for the migrant farmworkers. These two scenes are the two omniscient narrator’s perspectives, representing urban and rural inequities and social fronteras experienced by Panchito’s family.
Young children are the targeted audience for both of these picture books. The third-person perspective brings resolution to these stories: The closures are complete. These two reconstituted stories demonstrate that children’s literature are spaces for socialization (i.e., what we want young children to know and not know through children’s books). Poverty is romanticized in these stories, focusing on families showing resourcefulness and resilience. While class/race inequalities are evident, they are not emphasized in the storyline. As a society, we believe these social problems are not appropriate for young children to experience (even vicariously in literature) but many children live these social inequities on a daily basis; these are realities for children who are poor.
In Breaking Through, the sequel to The Circuit, Jiménez chronicles his adolescent years, beginning with age 14 until his first day of college. This realistic fiction packaged as a young adult novel is told in the first person, with Panchito, his older brother Roberto, and their mother at the center of the stories. The family is detained by la migra and forced to leave the United States, but they find their way back to California. Mamá holds the family together, especially since Papá can no longer work because of back problems (a source of frustration for him).
This family’s socioeconomic situation confronts the notion of the universal adolescent experience; its social construction is exposed as the family, especially the parents, challenge cultural experiences and expectations associated with this age group. For example, Panchito comments on how he does not have free time to cultivate close friendships or go out on weekends, because this is the time that Roberto and he work. American popular culture strains family ties. Breaking Through tells how teachers share their power and help Panchito navigate school literacies and culture. Race and class are central to this family’s experiences.
Panchito and Roberto are invited by the school janitor to collude with White privilege: the family knows all too well that a lighter skin tone might win them higher status, especially if they can overcome their Spanish accent. But the family does not try “to pass” as White. The maintenance of their Mexican American heritage is more important. Their accented language signals their cultural membership. In her book review, Rochman comments that the author “writes about a harsh world seldom seen in children’s books. Readers will discover an America they didn’t know was here” (Rochman: 2001, n.p.). Jiménez reveals U.S. power relations as lived by him and his family.
Panchito [Francisco] works hard for his accomplishments in school. It is misleading to think about Panchito’s resiliency separate from the hardships he and his family bear during these adolescent years. He and his family, especially Roberto and his mother, exercise collective power in many instances. Critical multicultural analysis requires that Panchito’s and his family’s responses to classism and racism be understood against these power relations.
Nonfiction Narratives
This genre claims to capture reality as it is, with the photography zooming in on the protagonist’s circumstances. Often, photographs, like drawings and paintings, offer a vantage point to view the story, and to observe power relations.
In A Migrant Family, published in 1992, the author Larry Dane Brimner positions Juan Medina, the protagonist of this illustrated nonfiction narrative, in a harsh and brutal world with his very first sentence: “As darkness bleeds from the sky, Juan shivers at the 6: 00 a.m. chill” (Brimner, 1992: 6). Juan and his family are migrant workers, hoping to wrest a marginal existence on the promise of minimum wage. The book documents the difficult living conditions most migrant workers endure. The black and white photographs offer the reader a proximate perspective to view this family’s migrant life, documenting great poverty. There is no “bright side” to this story.
Migrant labor dominates the life of this family. The story offers panoramic views of the broader context of the camp. The third-person perspective contextualizes the first-person point of view. The two focalizations are dialogic. Juan and his family refute and challenge stereotypes and social epithets. The family works together to survive.
Too often the workers fall prey to violent behavior on the part of outsiders. They have little recourse to U.S. law enforcement agencies. The makeshift camps are frequently cited for health code violations and forcibly disbanded. Because there is little regulation and because many migrant workers speak little or no English, they are easily victimized.
Although the conditions in the camp are oppressive, the money migrant workers can earn is far greater than a family could earn in many Mexican and Central American villages. The extraordinary poverty in their countries of origin is even more extreme than the conditions that they experience as migrant workers. Nevertheless, too many employers exploit the workers even to the point of withholding wages. Migrant workers who have undocumented status are the most vulnerable because they risk being reported by their employers to the Immigration and Naturalization Services.
Schooling is inadequate and often frustrating because it is interrupted by work availability, which depends on weather conditions and the harvest time of each crop. Most migrant families are constantly on the move. Programs have been initiated to help address some of these problems. The Encinitas Jobs Center in California helps both employers and workers. The Center issues library cards, helps with tax preparation, offers English classes, and provides employment services. While these community efforts offer relief, they do not represent structural change. Although agencies of this sort provide some support, it is clear that life for the migrant worker family remains difficult.
This book of photographs is one of the few in the text collection that confronts the sociopolitical context of the Mexican American migrant agricultural labor system. The poverty lived by this migrant family is portrayed in great detail, with no attempt to romanticize Juan’s migrant experience. The text is an intertext of the migrant farm work conditions in San Diego juxtaposed with the wealthy community up on the hill: “They want us to work,” Juan says. “And they want us to disappear” (Brimmer, 1992: 18), commenting on how the surrounding community wants their camp shut down.
The book reports that two young White men attacked the migrant workers and stole one laborer’s money. Upon leaving, one of the assailants hurls an epithet, “Wetback.” Juan is affronted by the word wetback, a racist/classist word for workers who cross the Mexican border, undocumented, to find work in the United States: “We have papers,” he says. “We have a right to be here. Who are we hurting?” (Brimmer, 1992: 17).
Because of their precarious and liminal place in society, farmworkers mistrust U.S. law enforcement. Although they rarely earn more than a minimum wage salary, it is still more money than a family could earn in Mexico. Moreover, they do the kinds of jobs that nobody else will do.
Juan dreams of being rich, “but first, school.” Many migrant children never complete high school: They are academically unprepared because of their nomadic existence and because of their child care and work responsibilities. In many cases, schools and teachers give up on them. In the end of the book, Juan has to set aside his notebook and go with his stepfather, Joel, to look for work.
School is a privilege that this family cannot always afford. This book shows the dilemma and contradiction between “the hope” and “the reality” of this migrant family, which demonstrates how race and class are inseparable in the migrant condition.
The sociopolitical framework that supports this system of oppression is exposed here through the third- and first-person perspectives. There are many culprits: the farmers who hire the migrant workers without providing suitable living quarters and wages; consumers who purchase the produce, expecting to pay minimum prices; the oppressive political and economic systems in workers’ countries of origin; the communities surrounding the farms that are usually inhospitable to the workers; and, the economic system that governs farm profit.
Voices from the Fields: Children of Migrant Farmworkers Tell Their Stories, written and photographed by Beth S. Atkin (1993/2001), is a montage of portraits, poetry (some translated by poet Francisco X. Alarcón and the children interviewed), interviews, and factual information to show the sociopolitical layers of the life of migrant workers. She demonstrates the class, race, and gender issues confronted by the families showcased, and links those experiences to structural policies and practices. The text shows the diversity of situations among this population. Family devotion and the role of education in “escaping the fields and helping other family members” are the central messages (Atkin, 1993/2001/6). One of the values of the Mexican American family, shaped by historical and sociopolitical factors, is to “help each other for the good of the entire family even at the cost of the individual” (Atkin, 1993/2001: 6). Many of the children speak of their mothers’ love and commitment to them.
The ideology of individualism is challenged throughout these pages as children speak about their commitment to their immediate and extended family. Victor Machuca states: “I think doing things like working together is important. It makes our family stronger” (Atkin, 1993/2001: 50). The last interview is of Mari Carmen López, who will attend college in the fall. She attended Yo Puedo Program (I CAN) (Perhaps this program could also include the collective “we” in their title.) but she claims that she “still [has] obstacles, like English” (Atkin, 1993/2001: 91). She further states that “always in my family, they’ve said how important education is, that not everyone is lucky enough to get one, and that we should always strive for the best” (Atkin, 1993/2001: 93). The discursive thread of luck is often associated with class mobility, ignoring the factors contributing to or hindering social mobility.
Migrant Worker: A Boy from the Rio Grande Valley, written by Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith (1996) and photographed by Lawrence Migdale, and Harvest, written and photographed by George Ancona (2001), are assembled as photo albums or scrapbooks. The color photography heightens the abundance present in the landscape and, in Migrant Worker, the “bright side story” and the hope education extends to the child.
Harvest, a photo-essay, juxtaposes rich land with poor people and introduces the reader to the migrant life of recent Mexican immigrants. The text is told in the third-person omniscient perspective with some interviews interwoven throughout the text. George Ancona documents the harvest of fruits and vegetables.
Ancona includes three interviews: one of a young mother, one of a retired farmworker, and one of a substitute teacher. The rest of the text describes harvest and family time on the farm, with the interviews bringing the reader up close to some of the hopes and concerns of these farmworkers. The young mother believes that hard work and education will reward her children. Isabel Sorio, a substitute teacher, wants her children to be educated, not deculturalized. She notes the dominating practices of migrant labor as a form of slavery.
The text ends with “La lucha sigue! The struggle goes on.” The open ending signals the work that still needs to be done so migrant farmworkers’ rights are protected. The United Farm Workers Union represents a small fraction of these laborers. The limited participation in the union leaves many agricultural workers vulnerable to unfair treatment and poor compensation.
These nonfiction narratives connect the personal to the political. They show how these families collaborate to survive the hardships produced and maintained by the migrant farmworker system, while at the same time adopting the discourse of education as the key to the American Dream. Narratives are dialogically constructed, addressing the specific living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers against a sociopolitical backdrop.
Picture Books
The picture book constructs an intertextuality between the textual and visual representations: the illustrations and text convey the relationship between the pictures and words. The illustrations contribute to the “position of power,” the location from which to view the social interactions among the characters. All of these picture books draw from realistic fiction, told from the third-person point of view, with the exception of Going Home, which is told from the first-person perspective. The cultural themes present in these texts include education, home, work, and the effects of migrancy.
Amelia’s Road, written by Linda Jacobs Altman (1993) and illustrated by Enrique O. Sánchez, is one of the first picture books to place the migrant child protagonist at the center of the story. The illustrations, textured acrylic-on-canvas paintings, give the reader a visceral sense of the setting. Amelia, the protagonist, hates the constant moving around that her family must do because of migrant farm work. There is no mention of the working conditions, the owners’ participation, the manner in which working and housing arrangements are made, or workings of the migrant labor system. In some ways, as Hazel Rochman (1993) claims, this story functions as metaphor for migrant farmworker experience.
In the author’s note at the end of the book, Altman does a credible job of describing the difficulties of migrant life. It is unfortunate that on the inside back flap of the book the migrant experience is trivialized by the statement “she identifies with migrant children because her family moved around often when she was young.” Clearly the author empathizes with her protagonist, and probably understands the fears of not being accepted into new schools, making and losing friends, and adjusting to new neighborhoods and communities. But the experience of being forced to live in a succession of marginal dwellings is vastly different from a middle-class experience with a succession of comfortable homes. Children of academics, children of service people, and children whose families enjoy upward mobility and maybe reassignment to different locations do not compare to children who must move from shacks to tents to barrack-like accommodations and subsistence living. Their lives are not safe, private, or predictable.
This book is not a window into how families live in different ways, as suggested by one book reviewer (Wilde, 1993); the difference is sociopolitically made. Told through a third-person perspective, this is a story of a Mexican American family, who are migrant farmworkers needing to travel from field to field for work. Amelia is tired of moving around and wishes to stay in one place. She works alongside her parents three hours each morning and then goes off to school: “By the time she had finished her morning’s work, Amelia’s hands stung and her shoulders ached. She grabbed an apple and hurried off to school” (n.p.). The family perseveres without complaining.
The story shows workers in a respectful way, but the migrant worker system is not questioned; it functions more as a backdrop or scenery. While Amelia creates a place she will call home, there is a complete silence about the power structure of the socioeconomic system that perpetuates a dependence on the exploitation of migrant farmworkers. Amelia shows agency when she decides to make the spot under the old tree her sense of home, a place of her own.
Amelia is dissatisfied about the kind of knowledge that her father possesses: “Other fathers remembered days and dates. Hers remembered crops” (n.p.). The farmworker’s knowledge has no value alongside school knowledge. Despite this, the ending of the story is filled with promise: “For the first time in her life, she didn’t cry when her father took out the road map” (n.p.). Amelia takes charge of the situation and creates permanence amidst the instability. She has a special spot, “a place she can come back to,” marking the return of the harvest cycle, but no economic change will happen for this family. This closed ending trivializes and contributes to the inevitability of the migrant experience.
Tomás and the Library Lady, written by Pat Mora (1997) and illustrated by Raul Colón, was inspired by a real life character, Tomás Rivera, who was a migrant worker and became a writer, professor, and chancellor of the University of California at Riverside. The illustrations, done in scratchboard overwashed in sun-drenched colors, create a dream-like atmosphere.
In this story, Tomás and his family spend winters in Texas and summers in Iowa as migrant farmworkers. The grandfather, who is an accomplished storyteller, sends Tomás to the library to gather more stories. The librarian invites Tomás into the library, supplies him with a refreshing drink of cold water, and offers him some books. The family appreciates the stories that Tomás reads to them. Tomás and the librarian develop a strong friendship over the course of the summer. When the family leaves to return to Texas, “the library lady” gives Tomás the gift of a new book. Told from a third-person perspective the text reflects the role libraries can play for migrant communities—a public home.
Although this story reveals little about the actual experience of migrant farmers, we see the support of the family, valuing of story, and the importance of a relationship with a key community member. The librarian is respectful of the child and his abilities, and genuinely interested in who he is. She sees him as an individual from a specific cultural group. The family is supportive of his interests. Unlike Amelia, Tomás is not devastated by his situation. He carries his sense of self with him.
The story’s ending is left open with possibilities. What books will Tomás read? What stories will he tell? Tomás is the new family storyteller, which points to the family’s future. But will Tomás’ stories displace his grandfather as teller? Certainly the family values Tomás’ ability to read, thereby giving him access to other stories. The danger is whether this access will devalue the stories Papa Grande has to tell. Will book knowledge be valued over lived experience and oral tradition?
Going Home, written by Eve Bunting (1996) and illustrated by David Diaz, told in first-person narrative, incorporates multiple focalizers, thus giving the story an interrogative edge. A migrant worker family returns to Mexico during Christmas time. Even though the family members are documented immigrants, they worry: “Are you sure they will let us back, Papa?” (Bunting, 1996: 5), a concern many of the characters express because of race relations in the Southwest. Opportunity is the underlying theme in this story.
On their journey back to Mexico, the children, Dolores and Carlos, discuss their parents’ choice to labor in the fields. The family is in the United States “for the opportunities,” Dolores, the oldest child, mimics her father. Carlos comments: “I don’t see them getting many of these wonderful opportunities” (n.p.). Dolores is critical of the association between the United States and opportunities. On their first night in Mexico, the children gain an understanding of their parents’ attachment to their homeland as they notice their parents’ ties to family, community, and the landscape.
During their visit to Mexico, the townspeople comment on the opportunities education affords in the United States, admiring the children’s ability to speak English and applauding the parents’ decision to emigrate. Nevertheless, the ending is ambiguous with the possibility held out that if they succeed in the United States they may return to Mexico.
The challenges of going from school to school are captured in the last picture book that draws from realistic fiction. First Day in Grapes (2002), written by L. King Pérez and illustrated by Robert Casilla, reflects the Mexican American migrant experience. This text, told in the third-person omniscient position and first-person perspective, depicts Chico’s reluctance about attending a new school again. He worries that kids will make fun of him. And they do.
His new teacher clearly is involved with the students: She plays baseball during recess. She notices that math is Chico’s strongest subject and invites him to take on challenging problems. During lunchtime two fourth grade boys mock Chico because of his tortilla lunch. He stands up and, using his math knowledge, proceeds to pose math problems for the boys to solve. This interrupts their bullying efforts and rallies other students to Chico’s side. Chico feels his power. In getting off the bus, he politely and pleasantly introduces himself to the “grouchy bus driver.” These two situations speak to Chico’s agency. He decides to resist the disrespectful ways some of the children treat the bus driver. Chico is a resister and an agent.
Linda Perkins (2002), one of the book’s reviewers, claims that this text is “an insightful glimpse of another way of life and a reminder that different kids have different talents.” We are concerned about the idea of viewing this situation as “another way of life;” rather, it is greatly shaped by race and class relations. First Day in Grapes demonstrates that this migrant family is exercising collaborative power to make their situation work against the difficult conditions created by the migrant agricultural labor system. The photographs and illustrations of nonfiction narratives and picture books offer a place from which to view the story. The next group of books uses poetic elements, which intensify the language use in these stories.
Poetry
Poetic elements deepen the language use in three picture books and two young adult novels. The first text, Gathering the Sun: An Alphabet in Spanish and English, is framed by the Spanish alphabet. It was first written in Spanish and then translated into English. The two picture books by Juan Felipe Herrera savor words in telling about his experience as an English language learner. Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, and Downtown Boy, also by Herrera, use footnotes to translate Spanish words or scaffold the reader’s understanding of Spanish, techniques providing an in-text code switching. All of these picture books are hybrids of picture book, realistic fiction, and poetry genres. Herrera’s young adult novels are told in free verse.
Gathering the Sun: An Alphabet in Spanish and English, told by Alma Flor Ada (1997), illustrated by Simón Silva, and translated into English by Rosa Zubizarreta, acknowledges and affirms the Spanish language. The text introduces the reader to the Spanish alphabet, providing a different view of the people who work the land, and offering some information about Californian agriculture, and Mexican culture and history. Barrera, Quiroa, and West-Williams (1999) maintain that “Respect and dignity for the nation’s Mexican American migrant farmworkers, young and old, is equally conveyed by the text and art of this book focused on the Spanish alphabet.” In order for this book to work as an alphabet book, it is the Spanish to which we must refer.
The poem “Orgullo/Pride” exemplifies the intent of this text: “orgullosa de mi familia/orgullosa de mi lengua/orgullosa de mi cultura/orgullosa de mi raza/orgullosa de ser quien soy. Proud of my family/Proud of my language/Proud of my culture/Proud of my people/Proud of being who I am” (n.p.). For the most part the book is a celebration and affirmation of love, honor, and pride in self and family, and an appreciation of nature. It is a visually sumptuous representation of migrant experience, with little hint of inequity or strife. A feeling of permanence pervades. The illustrations indicate an abundance that could be misleading if this text is not read alongside other depictions of the migrant experience.
The young adult novels by Francisco Jiménez help the reader become intimate with the family and each member comes to life. In Gathering the Sun, the reader gets a sense of each family as caring and affectionate but the reader does not get to know the family. In this text, we have no idea how stable the position is, although it is as if the family were permanently located in a fairly comfortable situation: The people are consistently adequately dressed, living in permanent housing, surrounded by the nuclear family (mother, father, boy and girl), in possession of a good-sized, well-maintained pick-up truck. The book becomes a paean of praise for the fruit of the harvest.
In Jiménez’s chapter books, it is clear that the family must move with the harvest. In addition, his young adult novels demonstrate the complexities of being a farmworker: the uncertainty, abuse, exploitation, disruptive nature of moving around, and the like. In Gathering the Sun, the “W” page is a thank you to the farmworkers for their harvest, the “Y” page connects the past and future of Mexican Americans, and the “Z” page closes the story with the message that ultimately nature is the one in control. The story closure of this Spanish alphabet book confirms that nature inevitably determines the harvest. This closed ending fails to consider that migrant agricultural work as an exploitive system of labor is socially made.
Poet Juan Felipe Herrera wrote Calling the Doves/El canto de las palomas (1995), illustrated by Elly Simmons, and The Upside Down Boy/El niño de cabeza (2000), illustrated by Elizabeth Gómez, to document his English language learning experience as a migrant child. These stories combine first-person narrative with lyrical language, realistic fiction, and magical realism. (Magical realism is a uniquely Latin American genre. It invites the real and the fantastical to exist side by side.)3
These two texts depict a loving family, with an affectionate father who is present. Book reviewer Annie Ayres (1996) maintains that these texts are “a welcome alternative to the usually bleak portrayal of the migrant farm-worker experience, this is an inspirational self-portrait of a loving family” (Ayres, 1996). There are strong bonds between people, their work, and the landscape. Choice is implicit in both of these stories. The parents envision a new life for their son, with choice and some sacrifice.
The Upside Down Boy/El niño de cabeza addresses the power teachers can share with their students. Mrs. Lucille Sampson, Juan Felipe’s third grade teacher, the teacher to whom the author dedicates this story, recognizes Juan Felipe’s talents with words, art, and music. She offers many invitations for him to explore and expand these talents. Even though his teacher does not invite Juanito to use Spanish in his learning, not acknowledging his first language as a resource for learning, she shares with him a love for language and values the use of music as an entry point to literacy learning.
This story affirms the author’s uneasiness about attending a new school. Education and English language learning are the cultural themes in this story. The author tells the next part of his life story when his family settles down so he can go to school for the first time. The text’s vibrant language and illustrations capture his feeling of being “upside down” as he learns in a formal context and acquires a new language. At school his friend Amanda helps him with the English language.
Juanito is a second language learner. He is motivated to learn English: “If I learn them [alphabet letters and numbers] will they grow like seeds?” (Herrera, 2000: 10). The alphabet letters are the seeds of the English language. Juanito’s teacher invites him to sing a song in English and recognizes his singing talent. His music leads him into poetry writing. While Mrs. Sampson’s pedagogy values multiple language modes, it fails to acknowledge that a child’s first language can be a resource for learning a second or additional language. Language and identity are bound together. Juanito’s full selfhood was not honored in this classroom.
In Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse (1999), the combination of Herrera’s free verse and first-person narration capture the immediacy and force of the power relations experienced by sixteen-year-old César García, the novel’s protagonist. Herrera pushes the boundaries of the genre of poetry to tell his story in the format of a novel. This series of poems takes the reader into the life of César García. César’s father, Papi César, leaves the migrant circuit in California, deserts the young César and his mother, and joins his other wife and children in Denver, Colorado.
César’s “school friends” too often lead him into trouble. Eventually, despite César’s getting into trouble, his mother and teachers, who believe in him, help him to find a path for himself.
Herrera demonstrates here that poetry can be a medium for reality. The free verse heightens the insidious nature of racisms and classism and sexism in this setting. Its sparseness conveys the economically lean quality of poverty. Social interactions are fast and hard. Identity constructions are intergroup and intragroup processes. This text shows how the power relations extant at Rambling West High School in Fowlerville, California, try to swallow César García up whole.
César struggles as a Mexican American teenager in a hostile school situation, a context that is new for him. The free verse amplifies his liminal status within this school community. He is marginalized because of his migrant farmworker status as well as his Mexican cultural and language differences. Extreme peer pressure to participate in racist, classist, and sexist activity through verbal and physical violence is commonplace at this high school.
César tries to hide his Mexican identity and looks to the marketplace to create a common culture and mask his heritage:
Xeng sits next to me and Miguel Tzotzil. Lunch.
Show him my shoes.
New Air Tigers Lucy bought me.
Hide my tortillas in the wrinkled bag.
(Herrera, 1999: 13)
The name brands offer new associations in the school context, which perpetuate intragroup racism and classism:
Maxy Ortega snarls,
Hollers to the new guy—Kick his butt!
He’s a scrapa, a wetback. Spits on me.
(Herrera, 1999: 30)
Gang life becomes a microcosm of society. César colludes with intragroup racism, and because of peer pressure, beats up his friend Miguel Tzotzil. We also recognize that César wants to cease his participation in petty crimes, violence, and drugs.
Mama Lucy protests school practices that discriminate against her son César and alienate the Mexican American students. She intervenes at the end of the story and offers to teach afternoon and Saturday classes that will bring Mexican American students back to their culture. Another ally, Ms. Steiger, who is a teacher in the alternative school that César attends, uses the arts, especially writing, to humanize “problem students.” She invites them to say the unspeakable, to write the undocumented:
Ms. Steiger said, Write about who you are.
Carlos Johnson laughed. Is something funny?
She asked. How can I write about myself?
I don’t even know what I am.
I don’t know if I am Black.
I don’t know if I am Mexican.
My parents never talk about it.
That’s it, Carlos. Write that.
Ms. Steiger smiled a big smile.
It was the first time
I heard Carlos
Talk in class. It was the first time
I heard he was Mexican and Black.
(Herrera, 1999: 151)
Carl Johnson is the ringmaster of many of the altercations represented in this novel. Ms. Steiger guides him to name the internalized oppression that he has experienced. Mama Lucy and Ms. Steiger embrace these young adults whose fast-paced high school environment guarantees failure. This novel ends like the author’s two other books, with Ms. Steiger creating a space for César and his classmates to find and hear their voices.
Downtown Boy (2005), a novel in verse written by Juan Felipe Herrera, is narrated by Juanito, the ten-year-old son of an undocumented migrant worker we familiarly know as “Papi,” generically from the boy’s point of view. The story opens with Juanito and his permanent resident mother, “Mami”, trying to lead a new non-migrant life in the sometimes mean streets of San Francisco. Juanito’s peripatetic Papi is often absent from the family’s new life, no longer because of migrant work but ostensibly to seek a cure from the healing health spas of Mexico. In actuality, Papi is visiting his older children from a previous marriage with Mami’s consent. Papi has two families, a thematic echo of his dual life in the United States and Mexico. “It isn’t easy having two families,” Papi later said to his son.
Alone with his Mami for much of the time, Juanito and his family’s values are sorely challenged by some proto-gang related youth culture in the barrio, as Chacho, his primo (cousin) said, “This is the Mission. Nobody cares.” The main struggle in the book is the effect constant moving has on the family, especially on Juanito. While his family life is characterized by a loving mother and father, the frequent absence of his father sets up a cultural and moral vacuum for Juanito which leads him into a world of pranks and petty thievery. Chacho uses slang like “Slickest”, “toughest cat”, and “Daddy-o”, 50’s patter that does not define him as a Mexican American per se, but as any American teenager in any American city or town. Chacho is a force to reckon with, immediately introducing himself as a dynamic agent of change on the first page of the book as he emphatically cajoles Juanito to join the boxing club. To Chacho, the most effective sign of agency is a strong right hook. Juanito recalls his father’s words against the use of violence, hesitates, but finally relents and agrees to box. “Don’t know what I’m doing here,” Juanito says to himself later at the gym. This should be taken literally and metaphorically. Juanito does not want to become one of the Harrison Street Boys and what that represents but cannot entirely resist and adhere to his father and mother’s instructions. “Respeto,” his mother says, and “Paciencia.” Respect and patience. “Chacho isn’t patient,” thinks Juanito, “Chumps are patient.”
Papi and Mami moved to the city to provide a better, less transient life for their son. But the tradeoff was diminished financial security for a family accustomed only to migrant farm work. “There’s no jobs for farmworkers in the big towns … But in big towns, there are beautiful schools!” said Papi to his son. Mami and Papi show a significant amount of agency in this move, but ultimately this capacity for positive change is limited by Papi’s minimal English acquisition, undocumented status, and lack of formal education.
Juanito’s Aunt Albina and Uncle Arturo represent the non-migrant entrepreneurial class. Albina runs La Reina Mexicatessen, a small Mexican-American deli, and Arturo runs the only tortilla-making machine in the Mission District. They are financially comfortable and an example of material success. Aunt Albina appears to exercise more independence in running her deli while Juanito’s mother exercises less agency with her dependence on Papi’s diminishing income. Classism and racism by the dominant American mainstream is largely veiled since very few Anglo-American characters are depicted outside the Mexican-American experience. There are ominous but brief brushes with welfare and immigration agents, but they loom largely more as anonymous threats than real characters. There is a continued sense of invisibility, a theme often repeated in the Mexican-American experience but also the critical necessity to be invisible as well. Maria, Juanito’s friend and neighbor, is only allowed to leave her undocumented father’s apartment to attend elementary school. Other than that, she must stay home, leading a life of invisibility. One day, after slipping each other surreptitious notes beneath each other’s doors, she and Juanito decide to visit the beach together. They are surrounded by beachgoers and an amusement park at their back, but they still experience complete anonymity.
Although Mami came to the United States in the 1920s and has a green card, she has been living the life of the migrant worker accompanying her undocumented husband up and down the state of California. They live a neverending immigrant experience, one that seldom achieves the critical mass of time in one place and one place only to experience a true rooted landing. In this sense, they are neither American nor Mexican. Juanito narrates:
Mexico feels like a house
where we used to live
so long ago no one remembers it,
or knows exactly where it is.
We always seem to talk about it though. Papi goes back and looks for it,
but I don’t think he’s found it yet. Mami says
he knows where he’s going
but I think he’s lost
and doesn’t know where the house
is anymore; he circles it.
Loses it again.
Why can’t this be Mexico?
(Herrera, 2005: 77)
Fairly early on in the book we learn that Papi is not entirely healthy. He suffers from early onset diabetes. Diabetes, like mental illness and public policy, has invisible but vicious long roots that feed on the blood of a sufferer’s life. In this way, the seeds for Papi’s illness and subsequent double amputation were sown well before his son was born. Seen as metaphor, it was almost a product of predestination. Emotionally, Papi was severed from both his right and left legs long ago, walking on borrowed time. As an undocumented immigrant, he stood neither in Mexico nor the United States. And when he gave up the only life he knew in order that his son could receive a stable and rooted upbringing, he became incapacitated.
The remaining novels in the text collection combine realistic fiction and autobiographical elements to represent the Mexican American migrant farmworker experience.
Realistic Fiction
Steinbeck once said that he wrote books “the way lives [were] being lived not the way books [were] written” (as cited in Reef, 1996: 92). Like Jiménez’s The Circuit and Breaking Through, all the texts in this section possess the social realism of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Tomás Rivera’s 1970 young adult novel, y no se lo trago la tierra … And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, first written in Spanish, is one of the first books to document the Mexican American migrant experience in great detail, an experience that was otherwise absent from the literary landscape. This text was newly translated and published by Arte Público Press in 1987, and reissued in 1995. The English translation is included in the second half of the book.
In his study of the undocumented immigrant representation in Chicano/a literature, Alberto Ledesma (1996) argues that Rivera’s text is the first to pay attention to the undocumented immigrant experience, even though Rivera refers to protagonists as migrant farmworkers. Ledesma maintains that Rivera did this intentionally to deflect attention from the farmworkers’ unauthorized status.
In Mexican culture there exists a social myth, based on religious superstition, that if you curse God’s name, the earth will part and you will be swallowed whole. This belief is the basis of the title of Rivera’s novel, a first-person narrative laced with multiple perspectives. The unnamed protagonist curses God’s name out of desperation at seeing his family, friends, and community endure poverty. The twelve chapters connect isolated events in the novel, each one symbolic of a month in the migrant cycle.
This text describes the migrant experience in the 1950s, by showing how a community is exploited or discriminated against by farmers, shopkeepers, and even other Mexican Americans. The young boy, who remains nameless throughout the story, struggles for self-identity amidst exploitation, migrancy, death, disease, and social conflict.
In Jesse (1994), a semi-autobiographical, first-person narrative, Gary Soto, one of the most prolific Mexican American writers, tells the story of Jesse and his brother Abel. Jesse, a high school student, drops out of high school at Christmas during his senior year and moves in with Abel because his family life with his stepfather and mother is dysfunctional. He registers at City College, a local junior college in Fresno, California, during the Vietnam War era. Abel and Jesse work as migrant farmworkers on the weekend to pay for their food; housing is covered by their social security checks that they receive because of their father’s industrial-related death. They resist White people’s expectations for Mexican Americans, as one of the peripheral characters denounces: “White people only saw Mexicans as manual laborers” (Soto, 1994: 15). They attend college as an attempt to break out of the migrant circuit.
These two brothers work hard at school and at work. They are committed to each other and come to each other’s help when necessary. Racist and classist assumptions about Mexicans and Mexican Americans as people and as students are challenged throughout the text. For example, one art student’s work is not accepted because the teacher cannot believe a Mexican American student could create such good art.
In his art class, Jesse decides to paint the farmworkers’ strike. He invites his mother to his class art show. She comments on Jesse’s course of study:
“Ay, Dios mio,” she said, wiping her eyeglasses. “Is this what you’re learning in college…”
…“Why can’t you go into electricity? Angie’s son is fixing radios and making good money. ’know he fixed the clock at St. John’s? He got his wedding almost for free for that.”
I shook my head no and led her to my drawing of striking field workers, which I had titled “¡Huelga!” The long dusty line of strikers curled out of view toward a sunset pink as a scar on a girl’s knee. I didn’t tell her that it was my drawing because I wanted her to like it a lot and then say, “This is really good, mi’jo. Who did this one?” But Mom wrapped her Juicy Fruit in an old coupon for Trix and said in Spanish, “¡Míra! These lazy people are giving us a bad name.”
“Mom, they’re strikers.”
…“Is this what you and Abel go to school for?” …
(Soto, 1994: 125–126)
“Which one was yours?”
“What?”
“The pictures. Which one was yours, mi’jo?”
(Soto, 1994: 128)
Jesse lies and tells his mother that his painting is the one with the giraffe poking his head through the hedge. She is so pleased.
Jesse’s mother colludes with racist and classist ideologies about what Mexican Americans can and cannot be. She wants her son to succeed in a world that only thinks of Mexican Americans as laborers. Jesse has other ideas for his future. He is conscious of the struggle within the farmworkers’ community, which his mother interprets as a rejection of work opportunities. Jesse’s mother’s collusion comes from her position in society. He rejects his mother’s expectations for the subject matter of his art, but never admits to being the artist of “¡Huelga!”
Jesse exercises collaborative power in helping his rich Mexican American friend with the college application process. Jesse shares his knowledge of how to apply to an institution of higher education as well as his writing talents. He co-writes Luis’ personal statement by capturing in writing what he says. Leslie, a Vietnam veteran and friend to Jesse and Abel, is a White ally to them and the Mexican American community. The story ends with Abel’s draft letter to go to Vietnam and Jesse imagining miles and miles of melons to harvest. The story closure questions how people could acquiesce to a socially unjust society: “… no one was getting up to set the crooked world straight” (Soto, 1994: 166).
Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child, written by Elva Treviño Hart (1999), is an autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farmworkers. Elva Treviño Hart was born in south Texas to Mexican immigrant parents. She spent her childhood moving back and forth between a small, segregated south Texas town and Minnesota.
Hart faces racial prejudices in school. She finds a way not to be judged subjectively: “In math there was only one right answer … if I just did my very best, then I didn’t have to fight, and I could get the best grade. I had finally found a place where being Mexican didn’t matter” (Hart, 1999: 177–178). She therefore chooses to pursue mathematics, a field with cut and dry answers, even though she prefers English and reading.
Hart comments on the gender roles awaiting her after high school: “I saw that once I finished high school I had to leave and probably not come back except to visit. My parents expected no more of me than to be a local Mexican girl who married a local Mexican guy and became a mamacita, a comadre, a tía, and finally, an abuelita … it would be fine with them” (Hart, 1999: 207). Her focus in mathematics led her to a graduate program in computer science and engineering at Stanford University, followed by a twenty-year career as a computer programmer for IBM.
Hart’s assimilation process separates her from Mexican culture and identity, and compromises the quality of relationships with her family. These consequences stem from survival strategies and choices made along the way. She experiences a “dual existence” as an adult.
Hart excels as a professional: “I had all the trappings of success. I was driving a Mercedes, flying all over the country on business, and vacationing in the Caribbean. As Gloria Steinem said, ‘We were becoming the men we had always wanted to marry’” (as cited in Hart, 1999: 231). She becomes “a particular man.” She buys into a class system that stratifies our society according to race and gender. It is not just “a man’s world.” It is a particular man’s world—White middle- and upper-middle class man. She colludes with dominant class ideology, which severs her from her Mexican background.
Hart’s life story is instructive because it demonstrates the tension between social and economic mobility and maintaining one’s own cultural heritage. These two developments do not have be mutually exclusive, but can become so when moving up socially requires a person to by-pass or move away from the culture/power history they have lived, creating a cultural disconnection. The struggle is to improve one’s socioeconomic situation while resisting dominant class ideologies, and working and living for collaborative power, and not just for personal wealth.
Hart quits her job at IBM and realizes her talents as a writer. She no longer lives the trappings of an affluent lifestyle, a desire that was an attempt to fill the void left by the poverty she lived as a child. Hart addresses that void through service and donates the profits from her auto-biography for scholarship funds. The book closes with Hart embracing herself as “a Mexican American woman writer.”
In Esperanza Rising (2000), Pam Muñoz Ryan builds her story on the life experiences of her maternal grandmother and the historical period of the early 1930s. Esperanza and her parents live a life of affluence in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Tragic circumstances force Esperanza and Mama to escape with their servants, Hortensia and Alfonso, and their son Miguel, to California, and settle in a Mexican migrant farm work camp. There they experience the challenges of hard work, acceptance by their own culture, and socioeconomic problems constructed by U.S. racist relations and the Great Depression. When Mama becomes ill with Valley Fever and a strike to protest working conditions threatens to uproot their new life, with the help of the community, the once-privileged Esperanza does everything she can to maintain life in the labor camp.
Ryan constructs this third-person narrative with multiple perspectives, creating a distance or estrangement for the reader to challenge the messages conveyed in the story. Esperanza’s mother, an influential role model, the powerful voice of Marta, one of the strike organizers, and the dialogues between Esperanza and Miguel offer a critique of the life of farm labor. Esperanza’s raised consciousness about her privileged past illuminates the social river that runs between Miguel and Esperanza. History provides the context for this story to unfold: the Great Depression and the repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico, the largest “involuntary migration” up to 1935.
Mama’s lived experience amplifies the gender relations of the time, especially for an affluent woman. She cannot claim the family estate after her husband’s death. She is not assigned housing because her family is not male-led. Eventually, Mama and Esperanza share living quarters with Hortensia’s family.
Throughout this young adult novel, most of the interactions between Esperanza and her mother signal Esperanza’s struggle to adapt to her new economic circumstances. Their conversations document her growing awareness of the privilege she enjoyed up to the border crossing. Imbedded in these dialogues are Esperanza’s classist attitudes toward people who are poor. For example, she equates the poverty and the unclean train conditions endured by the peasants with thievery and untrustworthiness. Mama and Miguel provide ongoing commentary to Esperanza’s classist and racist worldviews.
Esperanza marvels at the charity of Carmen, who is poor herself. She does not understand how Carmen can even think of others when her family has great need. Miguel responds: “The rich take care of the rich and the poor take care of those who have less than they have” (Ryan, 2000: 79). Esperanza naively still cannot understand why Carmen has to take care of the beggar, when a farmer’s market exists a few yards away. Miguel comments: “There is a Mexican saying: ‘Full bellies and Spanish blood go hand in hand.’ ” He continues: “Have you never noticed?” …. “Those with Spanish blood, who have the fairest complexions in the land, are the wealthiest” (Ryan, 2000: 79). His observation shows Esperanza that class and race relations work together within Mexican society. Esperanza comes to understand her new social position; she and Mama are peasants now. To survive they exercise collective power with Hortensia’s family and the rest of the migrant camp community.
Esperanza works hard to provide for Mama while she is sick. She witnesses other Mexican farmworkers laboring long hours in the fields. She is highly skeptical of the American Dream but Miguel has hopes:
In Mexico, I was a second-class citizen. I stood on the other side of the river, remember? And I would have stayed that way my entire life. At least here, I have a chance, however small, to become more than what I was. You obviously can never understand this because you have never lived without hope.
She clenched her fists and closed her eyes tight in frustration. “Miguel, do you not understand? You are still a second-class citizen because you act like one, letting them take advantage of you like that. Why don’t you go to your boss and confront him? Why don’t you speak up for yourself and your talents?”
“You are beginning to sound like the strikers, Esperanza,” said Miguel coldly. “There is more than one way to get what you want in this country. Maybe I must be more determined than others to succeed, but I know that it will happen.”
(Ryan, 2000: 222)
The next three realistic fiction narratives take place during the summer months of farming and harvest. All the protagonists are European American boys, one of working poor status, the other two of upper-middle- and middle-class standing, respectively.
These young men work alongside Mexican farmworkers. In each situation they come to know their work and living conditions. Books like Jiménez’s The Circuit and Breaking Through should be read alongside these books from the White working-poor, middle-, and upper-middle class perspectives, so they can amplify the Mexican American migrant farmwork experience in these texts.
These books represent a shift in focalization. In analyzing these three texts, we examine how power is exercised among the characters as well as how power relations are perceived. Like Suzanne Fondrie (2001), we agree that readers cannot “ignore the way whiteness provides white characters status and privilege not accorded to other characters” (Fondrie, 2001: 9).
Fondrie provides two guiding questions that are useful to critical multicultural analysis: “How do the characters embody White privilege? And how does White privilege work with class?” (Fondrie, 2001: 10). While Fondrie is advocating “reading a new way,” her recommendation does not take into account that power includes class and not just race relations, and that “multicultural aspects of children’s literature” exist in all literature, because all literature is a cultural artifact or product.
Consequently, Peggy McIntosh’s (1990) and Anne Marie Harvey’s (2001) lists of White privilege are problematic because, in many instances, they conflate White privilege with class privilege. All White people do not benefit from all the privileges outlined on these lists because of ethnic bigotry and economic oppression. In many ways, these lists essentialize the White experience and obscure intragroup/intergroup diversity and the workings of class, reflecting particular White experiences.
In The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer (2000), a young adult novel and memoir written by Gary Paulsen, the boy has contact with Mexican farmworkers in the first third of the book. This third-person narrative refers to Mexicans as a group most of the time or by gender and age, but never by name. Few Spanish words are imbedded in this text. Some microinteractions between the boy and the migrant workers exist.
The boy runs away from an abusive home situation and contemplates wealth, just like Juan Medina in A Migrant Family, as he is offered his first job on the road:
When he’d started hoeing he dreamt of wealth, did the math constantly until the numbers filled his mind. Eleven dollars an acre, an acre a day; after ten days a hundred and ten dollars, twenty days the almost-unheard-of sum of two hundred and twenty dollars. More than a man made per month working in a factory for a dollar an hour—and he was only sixteen. Rich. He would be rich.
But after the first day when his back would not straighten and his hands would not uncurl from the hoe handle and his blisters were bleeding, after all that and two-fifty for food, and three for the hoe, and fifty cents for the lodging, not to mention the hat and gloves, only a third of an acre had been thinned that first day, and he knew he would not get rich, would never be rich. By the second day he was no longer even sad about not being rich and laughed with the Mexicans who would also never be rich but who smiled and laughed all the time while they worked. Now, on the fourth day, gloved, he just hoed.
(Paulsen, 2000: 6–7)
The Mexicans share their food, music, and social commentary with the boy: “They know we are not legal; we are like ghosts that they see but do not recognize. As long as we just work and do not go into town or make a difficulty we are all right and they leave us alone.” (Paulsen, 2000: 43). He learns the work ethic of the Mexicans and questions the racist remarks he has heard about this cultural group in the past. The boy and the Mexicans exercise collaborative power as they share their meals together. With the encouragement of one of the Mexican men, the boy learns to capture pigeons from the barn rafters. Pigeons are a food source for the boy and the Mexican community.
After the hoeing is done, the Mexicans and the boy head down the driveway. The farmer stops the boy and offers him summer work, but the boy informs him that he is going with the Mexicans. The farmer replies, “But you’re not a Mexican and I thought … well, let’s try it another way. Can you drive a tractor?” (Paulsen, 2000: 49). The farmer does not offer stable work to the Mexicans because they are seen as disposable labor. The boy benefits from his White privilege and colludes with the farmer and stays on. Besides the predictable income, the boy remains behind because of possible romance with the farmer’s daughter, whom he never sees again.
Gretchen Olson, a berry farmer, wrote Joyride (1998), a third-person narrative. Jeff McKenzie, an affluent seventeen-year-old, who lives in a neighboring city, decides to go for a joyride through the countryside. In the darkness, he happens to drive through farmland, leaving a farmer’s damaged bean field behind. During that summer he works for the farmer to reimburse him for the damages. As a farmworker, he works alongside Mexican migrant workers, and becomes friends with one of the foremen, Macario. He comes to respect the migrant farmworkers, while, at the same time, recognizing his parents’ and friends’ racist attitudes.
The White working poor are stereotypically portrayed in this story. This class perceives the Mexicans encroaching on working class jobs as well as their town. Jeff’s parents and his school friends are stereotypically portrayed as racist and classist rich people, while the Mexican farmworkers are rendered as good-natured. Jeff, the farmer’s daughter Alexa, and Macario are the most fully embodied characters. The microinteractions among these characters are relational, revealing their assumptions about the world, thus offering the reader multiple subject positions.
Jeff is given some privileges early on the farm because he works hard, but also because he is White. He is assigned to drive the farm truck to make strawberry deliveries. His relationship with the farmer’s daughter, Alexa, flourishes as they work on the farm together. Alexa challenges the gender roles assigned to her by her community: she is smart, athletic, and plans to work on the family farm when she grows up. Jeff’s rich girlfriend Debbie, a walking stereotype tries to make him jealous by dating his tennis rival. She is divisive and colludes with gender power relations by wearing revealing clothing, being demanding, and playing the part of the submissive young woman.
In Under the Same Sky (2003), written by Cynthia DeFelice and told in a first-person narrative, fourteen-year-old Joe comes to understand his class and White privileges. His father wants him to learn what working is about, but his mother challenges this position, saying that Joe is still a child. The father answers that if he wants a motorbike, something a child would not desire, he is old enough to work. Joe begins working the fields, not really knowing much about the work or the Mexican community that assembled on his family’s land from April until November. His father gives Manuel, one of the migrant workers, a lot of responsibility, which annoys Joe. He notices the high regard his father has for this young man. Joe’s friends, Randy and Jason, make fun of Joe’s plans to work part of the summer. Jason mocks Joe with racist and classist remarks: “Señor José, amigo … why you not working in the fields earning muchos dineros?” (DeFelice, 2003: 14). Joe denounces Jason’s mockery.
Joe’s contact with Mexican farmworkers makes him reconsider his desire to purchase a $900 motorbike: “… here was Luisa [one of the young Mexican farmworkers], working so she could send money home to her family, money for food and clothes and stuff like that. I felt like a real jerk working so I could buy what [his sister] LuAnn had just described as a toy” (DeFelice, 2003: 152). Joe’s description of the farmworkers is humanizing; he places them on the landscape and connects their conditions to sociopolitical factors, in many ways, exposing how his family benefits from undocumented migrant farm labor.
Joyride and Under the Same Sky use the “under the same sky” metaphor to narrow the geographical and social distance between people and communities. The story closure connects two disparate places, urban and farming communities in Joyride: “[Jeff] looked at the sky—the same sky that stretched over a farm near Sheridan, Oregon. The same sky that looked over an oak knoll, an irrigation pond, a strawberry field … and a bean field” (Olson, 1998: 200).
In Under the Same Sky, Luisa asks Manuel to tell Joe that “she looking at the same sky” (DeFelice, 2003: 214). Joe thinks to himself: “I looked at the sky, at the sun that was also shining on Luisa in Sodus. I closed my eyes and let it warm my face …. Later that night, I sat under the maple tree and watched the stars come out, and then the moon, and felt Luisa watching them, too” (DeFelice, 2003: 215). The sky connects these young couples across social borders, social lines.
Concluding Remarks
Our critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature about Mexican American migrant children’s literature made visible how characters exercise power along the power continuum. All the characters exercise power, but the subject positions of collusion and resistance are more difficult to discern. The texts show raced and gendered expressions of class as characters interact with each other, offering multiple subject positions. In many instances the characters resist race, class, and gender ideologies and move toward collaborative power, but mostly within the family.
The focalization of the text shapes how stories are told. The texts with multiple focalizations construct a dialogic space for problematizing migrant farmwork. The single-focalized texts are less interrogative and require closer examination. The story closures contributed to the meaning of each story either by confirming the ideologies imbedded in the text or disrupting the prevailing explicit and implicit messages.
Each genre shapes how the stories are told, with hybrid genres, demanding more distancing strategies from the reader, especially the examination of the social construction of each genre. The cultural themes that emerge through critical multicultural analysis are expressions of U.S. power relations and are not intrinsic to this cultural group or the language in the texts. They situate how power is exercised within families, schools, communities, and society.
The poverty and marginalization experienced by migrant farmworkers call into question the ideology that everyone has equal access to the American Dream if they work for it. Penzenstadler (1989) speculates: “What would America be without the Dream? … If there had been no [B]lacks, [N]ative Americans, or Hispanics from whom Anglos could differentiate themselves, how would the American character have been delineated?” (Penzenstadler, 1989: 177). Mexican American literature questions the “Anglo American Dream—not only as to whether it is attainable by Mexican-Americans but as to whether it is worth attaining at all” (Penzenstadler, 1989: 177). Many Mexican immigrants trade in one form of oppression for another at the U.S./Mexico border. Reading class against culture makes visible how class, race, and gender work together within a cultural group’s experience.
Classroom Applications
· Invite children to make a multimedia collage of representations of class in words and images (e.g., newspapers, advertisements, literature, TV commercials, music videos, etc.). Locate patterns across these texts.
· Construct a map of Mexico and the contiguous United States of America. Trace the journeys of three of the characters in the bibliography using this map. Discuss when each of the states were originally part of Mexico.
· Build on the research by Rosalinda B. Barrera and Ruth E. Quiroa (2003) and their work with Rebeca Valdivia (2003) by investigating how Spanish is re/presented in these texts. What is the function of Spanish in the text collection? The presence of Spanish can deconstruct, construct, and/or reconstruct culture in children’s literature: English can conceal, while Spanish can reveal. Who is the implied reader for these texts? English language learners? Speakers of English?
· Conduct a critical multicultural analysis of the Judeo-Christian discourse circulating in the text collection. In what ways is the Judeo-Christian discourse implicated in some of these stories? How are the discursive threads of luck and good fortune linked to this discourse? What is this discourse doing in terms of how power is exercised, especially among the female characters?
· Complete a critical multicultural analysis of migrant farm work across cultures and over time. For example, how are European American migrant workers represented during the Great Depression? What are other migrant experiences represented in children’s literature (e.g., Jamaican or Haitian farmworkers)? How are race, class, and gender depicted in these stories?
· Examine poverty in other work circumstances, especially across different historical and sociopolitical conditions.
· Analyze work across cultures. In what ways are class, race, and gender enacted in these texts? How is power exercised among the characters?
· bell hooks (2000) advocates that class might be the unifying force across other social differences. In what ways can class be read across culture?
· Biographies, like other genres, distort reality and need analysis. Oftentimes, the people and life work highlighted are rendered separate or isolated from the people that supported them (Kozol, 1975; Kohl, 1995). Consider biographies about Mexican American migrant workers, especially depictions of the struggle within the migrant community. How do the biographies of César Cháves and Dolores Huerta, for example, depict the struggle among the migrant community? What are these life stories doing to our understanding of the migrant labor system? What do different biographers foreground and background in their construction of Dolores Huerta’s life, for example? How do these different versions affect the ideologies conveyed to the reader?
Recommendations for Classroom Research
· Compare recent migrant worker statistics with what the books are depicting. What gets portrayed or focused on? To reject cultural stereotypes, etc., does the story have to center on an individual or family experience extracted from the sociopolitical context that defines them? Is culture only seen in a vacuum? Look at Stephens’ (1992) work to address the way stories are constructed and how these constructions perpetuate the status quo and social oppression.
· How is work depicted? How is leisure portrayed?
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acuña, Rodolfo. (1988). Occupied America: A history of Chicanos (3rd ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
Day, Gary. (2001). Class. New York: Routledge.
Del Castillo, Richard Griswold & De León, Arnoldo. (1996). North to Aztlán: A history of Mexican Americans in the United States. New York: Twayne Publishers.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. & O’Neill, Phillip. (2001). Exploring a new class politics of the enterprise. In J. K. Gibson-Graham, S. Resnick & R. Wolff (Eds.), Re/Presenting class: Essays in postmodern Marxism (pp. 56–80). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gibson-Graham, J. K., Resnick, Stephen A. & Wolff, Richard D. (2000). Introduction: Class in a poststructuralist frame. In J. K. Gibson-Graham, S. A. Resnick, R. D. Wolff (Eds.), Class and its others (pp. 1–22). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham, J. K., Resnick, Stephen A. & Wolff, Richard D. (2001). Toward a poststructuralist political economy. In J. K. Gibson-Graham, S. A. Resnick, R. D. Wolff (Eds.), Re/Presenting class: Essays in postmodern Marxism (pp. 1–22). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Giecek, Tamara S. (2007). Teaching economics as if people mattered: A high school curriculum guide to the new economy (2nd ed.). Boston: United for a Fair Economy.
hooks, bell. (2000). Where we stand: Class matters. New York: Routledge.
Kelley, Jane, Rosenberger, Cynthia & Botelho, Maria José. (2005). Recurring Theme of Poverty in Children’s Literature. The Dragon Lode, 24(1), 25–30.
Lubienski, Sarah Theule. (2003). Celebrating diversity and denying disparities: A critical assessment. Educational Researcher, 32(8), 30–38.
Mantsios, Gregory. (2001a). Class in America: Myths and realities (2000). In P. S. Rothenberg (Ed.), Race, class, and gender in the United States (5th ed., pp. 168–182). New York: Worth Publishers.
Mantsios, Gregory. (2001b). Media magic: Making class invisible. In P. S. Rothenberg (Ed.), Race, class, and gender in the United States (5th ed., pp. 563–571). New York: Worth Publishers.
Ortner, Sherry. (1998). Identities: The hidden life of class. Journal of Anthropological Research, 54(1), 1–17.
Wojcik-Andrews, Ian. (1993). Toward a theory of class in children’s literature. The Lion and the Unicorn, 17(2), 113–123.
References
Children’s Literature
· Ada, Alma Flor. (1997). Gathering the sun: An alphabet in Spanish and English. Illustrated by Simón Silva. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.
· Altman, Linda Jacobs. (1993). Amelia’s road. Illustrated by Enrique O. Sánchez. New York: Lee & Low.
· Ancona, George. (2001). Harvest. Photography by author. New York: Marshall Cavendish Children’s Books.
· Atkin, S. Beth. (2000). Voices from the fields: Children of migrant farmworkers tell their stories. Photography by author. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
· Brimner, Larry Dane. (1992). A migrant family. Photography by author. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications.
· Bunting, Eve. (1996). Going home. Illustrated by David Diaz. New York: HarperCollins.
· DeFelice, Cynthia. (2003). Under the same sky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
· Dorros, Arthur. (1993). Radio man/Don radio. Illustrated by author. New York: HarperTrophy.
· Hart, Elva Treviño. (1999). Barefoot heart: Stories of a migrant child. Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press.
· Herrera, Juan Felipe. (1995). Calling the doves/El canto de las palomas. Illustrated by Elly Simmons. San Francisco: Children’s Book Press.
· Herrera, Juan Felipe. (1999). Crashboomlove: A novel in verse. University of New Mexico Press.
· Herrera, Juan Felipe. (2000). The upside down boy/El niño de cabeza. Illustrated by Elizabeth Gómez. San Francisco: Children’s Book Press.
· Herrera, Juan Felipe. (2005). Downtown boy. New York: Scholastic.
· Hoyt-Goldsmith, Diane. (1996). Migrant worker: A boy from the Rio Grande Valley. Photography by Lawrence Migdale. New York: Holiday House.
· Jiménez, Francisco. (1997). The circuit: Stories from the life of a migrant child. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
· Jiménez, Francisco. (1998). La mariposa. Illustrated by Simón Silva. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
· Jiménez, Francisco. (2000). The Christmas gift/El regalo de Navidad. Illustrated by Claire B. Cotts. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
· Jiménez, Francisco. (2001). Breaking through. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
· Mora, Pat. (1997). Tomás and the library lady. Illustrated by Raul Colón. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
· Olson, Gretchen. (1998). Joyride. Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press.
· Paulsen, Gary. (2000). The beet fields: Memories of a sixteenth summer. New York: Delacorte Press.
· Pérez, L. King. (2002). First day in grapes. Illustrated by Robert Casilla. New York: Lee & Low.
· Rivera, Tomás. (1970/1995). —y no se lo tragó la tierra…. And the earth did not devour him. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press.
· Ryan, Pam Muñoz. (2000). Esperanza rising. New York: Scholastic.
· Soto, Gary. (1994), Jesse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
· Viramontes, Helena María. (1995). Under the feet of Jesus. New York: Penguin Publishers.
Secondary Sources
· Ayres, Annie. (1996). Book review of Calling the Doves/El canto de las palomas. Booklist, 92 (9 & 10).
· Barrera, Roslinada B. & Quiroa, Ruth E. (2003). The use of Spanish in Latino children’s literature in English: What makes for cultural authenticity? In D. L. Fox & K. G. Short (Eds.), Stories matter: The complexity of cultural authenticity in children’s literature (pp. 247–265). Urbana, IL: NCTE.
· Barrera, Roslinada B., Quiroa, Ruth E. & Valdivia, Rebeca. (2003). Spanish in Latino picture storybooks in English: Its use and textual effects. In A. I. Willis, G. E. García, R. Barrera, V. J. Harris (Eds.), Multicultural issues in literacy research and practice (pp. 145–165). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
· Butcher, John S. (2002). Aspects of travel and movement in children’s literature. The New Advocate, 15(2), 145–155.
· Clifford, James. (1997). Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3), 302–338.
· Dresang, Eliza T. (1997). The resilient child in contemporary children’s literature: Surviving personal violence. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 22(3), 133–141.
· Fondrie, Suzanne. (2001). “Gentle doses of racism”: Whiteness and children’s literature. Journal of Children’s Literature, 27(2), 9–13.
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· Gonzales, Manuel G. (1999). Mexicanos: A history of Mexicans in the United States. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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· Kohl, Herbert. (1995). The story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott revisited. In Should we burn Babar? Essays on children’s literature and the power of stories (pp. 30–56). New York: The New Press.
· Kozol, Jonathan. (1975). Great men and women (Tailored for school use). Learning Magazine, (December), 16–20.
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· McIntosh, Peggy. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School (Winter), 31–36.
· Penzenstadler, Joan. (1989). La frontera, Aztlán, el barrio: Frontiers in Chicano literature. In D. Mogen, M. Busby, & P. Bryant (Eds.), The frontier experience and the American dream: Essays on American literature (pp. 159–179). College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press.
· Perkins, Linda. (2002). Book review of First Day in Grapes. Booklist, 99(6).
· Reef, Catherine. (1996) John Steinbeck. New York: Clarion Books.
· Rochman, Hazel. (1993). Book review of Amelia’s Road. Booklist, 90(2).
· Rothenberg, Daniel. (1998). With these hands: The hidden world of migrant farmworkers today. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.
· Rothenberg, Paula. (Ed.). (2004). Race, class, and gender in the United States: An integrated study. New York: Worth Publishers.
· Spring, Joel. (2004). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: Brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the United States (4rd ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
· Stephens, John. (1992). Language and ideology in children’s fiction. New York: Longman.
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· Wilhem, James J. (1985). Garland publications in comparative literature. New York: Garland.
Endnotes
1. The main title of this chapter is inspired by Francisco Jiménez’s book, The Circuit.
2. Jiménez was instrumental in editing The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature, the first volume of critical essays on Chicana/o literature. Bilingual Press published this collection in 1979. This collection demonstrated “evidence of the vitality of scholarship on Chicano literature” and its rightful place in American literary study (p. ii). He also edited Poverty and Social Justice: Critical Perspectives: A Pilgrimage Toward Our Own Humanity, a collection of essays on poverty, published by Bilingual Press in 1987. The intent of this volume was to show the origins of poverty, to speculate on possible solutions, and to challenge the reader “to confront and reflect upon the moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of poverty” (p. 10).
3. Magical realism is based on Western views of reality, while creating a space for the representation of myths and beliefs of Indigenous peoples of Mexico and other Latin American countries (Wilhem, 1985).