Poets, Artists, and Storytellers: Bilingual, Bicultural, and Transnational Narratives

This Letter synthesizes and highlights bilingual and multilingual children's books by U.S. authors that focus on the Latin-American immigrant experience. Trends in picture books by bilingual and multilingual children's authors in the United States over the past two decades focus on the authors' hybrid identities, often drawing upon their own lives in terms of transnational-bicultural-multicultural experiences that represent the authors' own complex cultural and linguistic heritage.

Often these texts, evoking the nuances of the settings and characters who inhabit cultural and linguistic borderlands, are written by authors who while writing prose or poetry are also author-illustrators or whose books represent vivid narrative depictions of bicultural Latino lives. The books discussed here represent the continua of the types of experiences that capture the author's own lived experience. One example is Carmen Lomas Garza, a native Texan from Kingsville, who portrays stories that resonate broad themes through art and words both In My Family / En Mi Familia and Family Pictures / Cuadros de Familia. Other authors include Juna Felipe Herrera, Francisco Jiménez, and Tomas Rivera.

The texts discussed in this Letter are primarily what are known as parallel texts, or texts that present narrative or poems in both languages. In this case, English is presented (typically first) juxtaposed with a Spanish translation, often done by the author as translator reflecting her or his own pride in the native tongue. Most significantly, these texts lend themselves well to analysis of social and historical issues and themes of racism, linguistic isolation, family, and hope. Bilingual and multilingual texts are especially relevant with changing demographics in the United States and internationally; they offer insight into those not from the author's background.

Lee and Low Press in San Francisco publish children's monolingual and bilingual books from a wide context of backgrounds. One of this publishing house's more famous authors is Chicana artist and writer Carmen Lomas Garza, who composes vignettes that center around themes of music and oral traditions such as the haunting and legendary La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), a classic story of a wandering ghost woman who weeps for the children she drowned. La Llorona is a haunting figure representing an endless search for redemption. This story transgresses the more typical narrative picture storybook shared in U.S. elementary classrooms. Similarly, Gloria Anzaldua's dual-language text Prietita and the Ghost Woman / Prietita y la llorona portrays La Llorona in a more positive light, in contrast with most versions of this well-known traditional Southwest U.S. legend. Garza's identification with strong themes of identity and agency are also reflected in her artist's statement on her website (http://carmenlomasgarza.com/). Garza's detailed illustrations with subtle richness evoke traditions of family but also the spiritual and religious nature of Mexican-American customs. For instance, La Virgen de Guadalupe is visible in most illustrations, as are crosses, rosary beads, and churches. Women are portrayed as caring, nurturing healers (the picture of la curandera [the healer] demonstrates this well. Garza states in the front matter that as a child she was chastised for speaking her native tongue, Spanish. She states, "My art is a way of healing these wounds, like the saliva plant (aloe vera) heals burns and scrapes when applied by a loving parent or grandparent."

Border crossings to the United States as well as return to the home country are a key feature of Latino youth who may cross not only the physical border but the cultural and linguistic border, as well; these are seen in Amada Irma Perez' My Diary From Here to There / Mi diario de aquí hasta allá. The narrator shares her mixed emotions, loss of home, hope for her family's future, reflecting a dual or hybrid identity of retaining one's language while relocating to a new physical place. The journey itself is transformative through the author's lens that becoming American is found in this zone between two cultures.

Similarly, in La Mariposa Francisco Jimenez shares an excerpt from his longer young adult novel The Circuit about the author's...