Get to know the vendors
Carmen Rivera crivera@scholastic.com (212) 727-3035
She is a great person to work on establishing collections, especially for children. I have known her since 1994, she is always at ALA and I believe also at TLA.
Selection Resources
An Academic Center at California State University San Marcos that promotes literacy in English and Spanish. The Center endeavors to inform current and future educational decision-makers about books centered around Latino people and culture and about books in Spanish and their value in education of English-speaking and Spanish-speaking children and adolescents. The center's Director is Ms. Isabel Schon.
Ms. Schon is the “guru” for reviewing children’s materials. She has written several books on recommended titles of children’s books and also continues to write book reviews in Book Links, Booklist, and Childhood Education among others. She has high standards, and I think they are good standards to follow. I was a children’s librarian for a number of years and I concentrated much of my energy doing bilingual story times. I love children’s literature and I do feel very close to it. I am no longer a children’s librarian but a mother of two girls, 5 and 2 ½ year olds who are bilingual. I have been lucky to find a Spanish immersion daycare program that has helped us immensely nurturing their Spanish, but I know that we still have a lot of work ahead of us at keeping up with the language, since the outside pressures towards English speaking dominance are so huge. I do my best to balance our reading materials, between English and Spanish and I check out a lot of children’s books from the library. I like to bring home both translations and original works. However, I have found out that many translations are not up to my standards.
There are many, many translations of children's books that to the uneducated eye seem just fine, but they contain lots of details that are not right. They may lack articles, the verbs may not be conjugated right, perhaps the sentence is badly constructed, etc. Sometimes, for the sake of space, translators choose to limit the number of words over grammatical correctness. As a parent, I hesitate to bring these to my home for fear that my children will be learning incorrect Spanish. They just don’t sound good, and since we don’t have as many sources to draw from for Spanish as we do for English, I want the sources that they do have at hand to be the best. As second language acquisition theorists point out, one needs to have a solid base on one’s first language (in this case correct Spanish grammar, and vast vocabulary in Spanish) in order for the second language (English) to be mastered as well. Happily, you can use a source such as Isabel Schon’s website to determine before hand, which are worthy translations for you to purchase and for your patrons to use.
In most libraries, because children transition into English as they get older, it seems that the majority of Spanish speaking youth population is younger children (0-10) and then adults. If this is the case, it makes sense to buy picture books, as well as non fiction books in Spanish for the little ones. The assumption is that most children 12 and up, have transitioned into English, and stop maintaining their Spanish. I wish it wasn’t that way, but it does seem to work like that, especially because of the way our educational program works. Therefore circulation of J’s and Y’s may not be as high as that of picture books. It is good to have nonfiction to support school homework. It is frustrating to try to help children with their homework when one does not have any non-fiction material to support it. That said, it is a good idea to have some J and YA titles available as well. Although small, there is still a need for these titles. Currently Graphic Novels are quite the rage for this age group, and supply is following the demand for these.
Purchase Award Winners
The Tomas Rivera award: http://www.education.txstate.edu/subpages/tomasrivera/index.html
The Pura Belpre Award: http://www.ala.org/ala/alsc/awardsscholarships/literaryawds/belpremedal/belprmedal.htm
America’s Book Award For Children’s and Young Adult Literature: http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CLACS/outreach/americas.html
And our own chapter of REFORMA put out a recommended list a while back:
http://www.main.org/reforma/Lists/readinglist.html
Another worthy link to study from National REFORMA that talks about children’s materials is http://www.reforma.org/CAYASCweblinks.doc
Also, as for adults, don’t forget the music. Many recent immigrants come from rural communities and have very low literacy skills. They may have not finished elementary school, let alone HS, and many parents are not familiar with children’s nursery rhymes and songs. I believe it is extremely important to pass these on to their children. It is part of their culture and it is how they acquire language, the language that will allow them to later learn English at school. One very popular singer is Jose Luis Orozco. He has lots of children’s recordings. http://www.joseluisorozco.com/
One that old timers might recognize is Francisco Gabilondo Soler, otherwise known as Cri-Cri.
There is a relatively new book that came out by Alma Flor Ada (A great children’s author by the way) titled: Pio Peep! (2006) The newest edition came out with a CD and it is just beautiful, both the text (illustrated by Vivi Escriva) and the music.
(212) 965-7466 crivera@scholastic.com
An Excerpt from the new revised edition of the book Serving Latino Communities: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians will give you ideas on how to evaluate and select materials for Latino children and young adults, by Camila Alire and Jacqueline Ayala.
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