The New York Times has a piece lamenting the lack of Latino faces in kids books:
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing segment of the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer, who began as a cartoon character, is an outlier.)
It’s a typical piece from the NYT, the purpose of which is just as much about getting the target group up off its feet as it is to stick its thumb in the eye of the white status quo. The NYT generally values reading and things reading is A-OK but Latinos don’t really seem to agree but the NYT thinks that they should agree. That they don’t agree implies some systematic roadblock. If our society were truly fair then Latinos would *want* to read just as much as the kids who read Judy Bloom and Harry Potter.
The lack of familiar faces is probably responsible for a substantial part of the achievement gap:
Hispanic children have historically underperformed non-Hispanic whites in American schools. According to 2011 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a set of exams administered by the Department of Education, 18 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were proficient in reading, compared with 44 percent of white fourth graders.
Research on a direct link between cultural relevance in books and reading achievement at young ages is so far scant. And few academics or classroom teachers would argue that Latino children should read books only about Hispanic characters or families. But their relative absence troubles some education advocates.
There is little discussion of cultural or national differences in enthusiasm for reading. While, yeah, there are many fewer literary role models for Latino kids, this might also be a function of a weak cultural affinity for reading in the first place. People from down south of the border really love tortillas and chili peppers, and they’ve certainly brought that aspect of their culture with them and infused it into the prevailing whiter society. I’m a waiter at an Italian restaurant, and many Latino patrons request red peppers or cayenne pepper or tabasco or *something* to spice up their food. Point is, they are in this country what they are in their previous country, and it is entirely possible that they brought with them a lesser desire to a.) read books b.) write books and c.) care about books at all.
Parapundit Randall Parker has one of the few posts on this topic that I’ve seen. I’ve cribbed the whole thing below. It reminds me of the time that Laredo, Texas, a town of 250,000 right on the border of Mexico, closed its only bookstore.
***
Books are unpopular in Mexico.
Despite having three times the population of Argentina, Mexico produces about 2,000 fewer titles each year. There are roughly 500 bookstores in Mexico, which translates into one for every 200,000 Mexicans, compared to a ratio of one to 35,000 in the US and one to 12,000 in Spain, according to the Mexican Booksellers Association. A recent UNESCO study revealed that Mexicans read on average just over two books per year, while Swedes finish that many every month.
The Mexican government has made great strides, reducing illiteracy to less than 8 percent, compared with around 20 percent two decades ago, placing it leagues ahead of Central American countries and even beyond Latin America’s other economic powerhouse, Brazil. Yet it has had little success encouraging active reading.
Bookstores are a lot like America to most Mexicans: a foreign alien land.
But, some argue, the European countries already had a public predisposed to reading. “For the majority of Mexicans, bookstores are a completely alien place,” says Jesus Anaya, editorial director at publishing house Grupo Planeta. Although more titles and lower prices would certainly appeal to current readers, he doubts they’ll create new ones. “I’m not sure that waving a magic wand of fixed prices can bring this cadaver to life.”
Of course this is consistent with average Mexican immigrant academic performance in the United States. Over 4 generations there is no trend of improvement in academic performance though the first generation native born descendants are an improvement over the average 8th grade educational level of the initial arrivals. America is a first world country with a highly productive and developed economy. That economy has a declining demand for low skilled manual laborers as demonstrated by a continually widening gap between the most and least skilled and as a result wages at the bottom end are not keeping up with average wage increases. The most developed economy in the world does not need immigrants who do not like books.
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Ya mean the animated series about the bean bandit repairman with talking tools who really cares about recycling hasn’t inspired a lot of Hispanics to read? Oh well, what can you do…
…Or at least they don’t like to read in English.
Ya mean the animated series about the bean bandit repairman with talking tools who really cares about recycling hasn’t inspired a lot of Hispanics to read? Oh well, what can you do…
I’m sure there’s a book in their backpack, backpack…..backpack, backpack.
This is bullshit liberal pandering. My cousins and I grew up in an Italian ghetto, all had very Italian names and features, and never saw anyone who looked like us in any book. Nor did they have names like ours. Yet we all read all the time. Why? One reason was because our parents insisted on it. The other is we grew to like it.
Also, how many Asian faces or names do you see in books, or anywhere for that matter? Yet I don’t see that group not reading, judging by their SAT scores.
Umm. Are we talking about picture books?
Because most of the rest of the time, at least in books I’ve read, main characters’ physical appearance isn’t usually framed in racial terms. I mean, yeah, the names tend to be indicative of ethnicity, but is the Odyssey less interesting because its hero isn’t called Pedro?
By the way, I am not Greek. But I read it anyways (albeit for a class in high school).
Mario sounds like a nerdy hispanic activist in training.
Mexico still has lots of Woolworth’s-type stores like Vips and Sanborn’s (owned by Carlos Slim) that contain sit-down restaurants, but also sell electronics and have small but reasonably well-stocked bookstores. I doubt these counted towards the 500. Many of the books are at least middlebrow, but most are shrink-wrapped, which discourages browsing.
What’s really popular is the magazine section, the gossipier the better. Outdoor newsstands are also fairly prevalent. But yeah, it’s more TMZ than NYT.
The NY Times doesn’t see their racism by thinking that the only way non-whites can enjoy a book or be engaged when reading is if there is a character that looks like them.
Oh I call bullcrap on this in every direction. Not many books with little Hispanics in them?? Puh-leeze!
The children’s publishing world has been neck deep in multi-culti pandering for decades. The books with little blacks and browns in them are legion, and the (insane, fantasy, SWPL dreamscape) marketing of books to blacks and browns is relentless. Relentless!
Of course the reality is that it’s mostly white and Asian kids reading all these books with black and brown characters. Know what the #1 book on Amazon under Children’s Books > Fairy Tales is called? It’s called Dragons Love Tacos. Aye carumba!
In fact, go to Amazon and enter this search: “Children’s books Hispanic.” Results = 2,994.
But no amount of reality is ever going to dislodge the SWPL fantasy of “little blacks and browns are under served by every form of media.”
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
Normal 8 year olds don’t speak in calibrated negatives. Chubby little Mario is parroting an overbearing adult.
The lack of familiar faces is probably responsible for a substantial part of the achievement gap:
Perhaps you are only being sarcastic, but the reality is that genes are responsible for the most substantial part of the achievement gap. That is, the lack of white or east asian genes.
Why aren’t more kids like mario the tragic victims of DUI wrecks, kidnapping, accidental gunfire, etc
It highlights again the diversity sham. The NYT isn’t angling for books about Mexicans or Guatemalans. For one this would require knowing something about either people. They are just wanting to plop a brown person in a story about white people and call it diversity. Far from a diversity of cultures, we have everyone as a sort of deracinated consumer.
They are just wanting to plop a brown person in a story about white people and call it diversity.
AKA, moral peacocking.
A branch of the local public library, on the side of town that’s been inundated by Hispanics, set up a huge Spanish language section within children’s books. There were often numerous Hispanic patrons (I used to frequent this library because it had so few White patrons, so I could get recent titles without a months-long wait), and they avidly checked out . . . the Spanish language kids videos (now DVDs). Often, English titles we wanted for our kids weren’t available in that branch, but there’d be numerous, brand-new books in Spanish, which had obviously never been opened.
One of the only places I can go in town and not hear Spanish spoken is either the library (now filled with Chinese-language books and newspapers) and the bookstore (White people).
How funny that there’s a best buy ad at the bottom of the article and there’s only 1 white person among the group of 5 blue shirted employees.
There is no question that children benefit from stories that reflect members of their communities. what’s missing though is recognition that this is not simply an issue for Latino students. I would argue that it is imperative for white children to read about a world where Black, Latino and Asian characters are prominent protaganists and not occassional tokens.
In many school systems across the country the plurality or majority of entering students are Latinos. Would it upset the foundations of American education to have a little more material that presents not only to the Latino kids, but to all kids growing up in a changed country, a set of protagonists that reflects the makeup of today’s youth? Really now, would that be such a terrible thing?
I would argue that it is imperative for white children to read about a world where Black, Latino and Asian characters are prominent protaganists and not occassional tokens.
Similarly, it is apparently imperative that white children read about a world where whites are a plague upon humanity, slaying “indigenous” populations the world ’round, crushing innocent NAMs with their omnipresent racism, repressing women and gays. Because this is, actually, what white children are forced to read on a regular basis.
white chiildren NEED to read about the transgressions of their forefathers in order to not reapeat the evil
“But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
Normal 8 year olds don’t speak in calibrated negatives. Chubby little Mario is parroting an overbearing adult.”
Exactly, jz. What eight year-old speaks like that?
I always find articles about race in media (published, televised, etc.) amusing because I don’t think the lack of black people in books has ever deterred me from reading. Books are an entrance into another world, an opportunity to engage in new experiences. It’s a bit narcissistic and childish to avoid books because there are no characters with a background similar to your own.
On a side note, I assume (perhaps unfairly) that books with black people on the cover will be unnecessarily sexual or have ghetto themes that I find uncomfortable, so I never pick them.
We need books about LaQueesha, a 21 year old, crack smoking, welfare dependent mother of 3 children from 3 different men who are all in prison and will never meet their children. This way young bucks won’t repeat the transgressions of their parents. Why don’t blacks, asians and latinos start writing more books about the plight of colored peoples in the western countries they move to for a better life? It has nothing to with whites having a superior combination of intelligence and creativity, does it? White people have produced more brilliant writers than all other races combined.
White people have produced more brilliant writers than all other races combined.
FALSE
all the ides werre stiolen
you need to partake in “blue eyes”
@TWTS,
we need books about LaQueesha, a 21 year old crack smoking, welfare dependent mother of 3 children from 3 different men who are all in prison and will never meet their children……………
There is an author in my community who approximates that by writing on salacious AA church scandal, AA family sex scandals, etc. Her writing is literary tripe. Endless paragraphs of “Subject verb noun. Subject verb noun. Subject verb noun.” It fills a niche for barely literate readers.
http://www.kimroby.com/about.php#biography
I always love the Blacks are just as smart as white people and more athletic but whites managed to steal everything. I’d like this to just be anti-racist trolling but I know real black people who think that. Somehow a equally smart (or smarter), stronger race got absolutely dominated by weak Europeans and are still sitting at the bottom of the status spectrum. White people snuck into Africa and stole auto’s, advanced mathematics, literature, rockets, machine guns, advanced medicine then wiped out the Africans and destroyed any historical evidence of our clever thievery.
Somehow a equally smart (or smarter), stronger race got absolutely dominated by weak Europeans and are still sitting at the bottom of the status spectrum.
Yes, not to mention that blacks are infinitely superior but only seem to achieve reasonable living standards in proximity to whites… see Haiti, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Iraq, Nigeria, etc.
Mexicans are the whiniest people on the face of the planet. Asians come here and blow them away academically. Asians don’t need Asian faces in books to succeed.
Mexican excuses are endless- I’ve been listening to the myriad excuses for decades now.
Newer IQ tests say Hispanics have an average IQ of 89. White: 100. Asians: 115. Maybe that’s where the problem lies.
Send them home.
@Chuck- I briefly dated a Mexican girl a while back. The relationship didn’t last very long because I spent about as much time reading books as she did watching TV (and it was usually either Univision or garbage TV that had content similar to Univision, like MTV) and soon we didn’t really have all that much to talk about. So, as far as my anecdotal evidence is concerned, Mexicans don’t have anything approaching a culture of reading.
I’d be interested to know if little Mario is really a person. Does an 8-year-old really focus on that kind of thing? It sounds suspiciously like the NYT has made up a character (they will say it’s really an amalgam, kind of like Obama’s Julia) to make their point. They are willing to do or say anything to get their narrative across – right, wrong, or indifferent. So moral and ethical, these NYT Ivory Tower denizens!
I totally noticed that on my most recent trip to LA (about two years ago). I was making a major push to get fluent in Spanish and was angling for a place to pick up some reading material, so I went down one of the major thoroughfares (can’t remember which one it was) and it was mile after mile of Latino everything. But not one bookstore or news shop or anything that sold stuff to read. Finally I did find one storefeont saying it was a libreria and went in … And there eas practically nothing in the place. Some fold out tables like you see in church reception areas, with some magazines and children’s books laid out on them, that’s it. I left wondering what most people even read there other than the newspaper and the Bible. Disturbing. Unfortunately had to shelve my spanish due to other pressing needs but I definitely want to finish that job.
For the sake of future Chinese historians studying the demise of Western Culture, let it be recorded that anti-racist’s comment at 12/05/2012 at 12:14 pm is taken word-for-word from a comment in the NY Times story ascribed to “vivian.” It even has the same typos.
Anti-racist, try harder!!
By the way, if you want to stab knives into your brain, read some of the comments at the Times story. Oh my god, four was all I could stand. They really DO believe their own fantasies.
anti-racist’s comment at 12/05/2012 at 12:14 pm is taken word-for-word from a comment in the NY Times story ascribed to “vivian.” It even has the same typos.
Lazy, thieving, and incompetent… I suppose it would be wrong to say that is about what you’d expect from certain groups of people.
My experience of 9 years in a large, north-eastern Gulf Coast city in Mexico produced the same thing that Fiddlesticks noted: 1 Sanborns with around 300-500 ‘middle-brow’ titles, all vastly overpriced and shrinkwrapped; 2 or 3 independent ‘booksellers’ that sold school textbooks – and this in a metro area of 800,000 people and two major universities.
Right JZ, if fact I would say the quote was entirely fabricated.
There aren’t many faces that look like Mexican-Americans on Spanish-language Univision either, starting with anchorman Jorge Ramos.
@ peterike
“Similarly, it is apparently imperative that white children read about a world where whites are a plague upon humanity, slaying “indigenous” populations the world ’round, crushing innocent NAMs with their omnipresent racism, repressing women and gays.”
God I miss those days!
Maybe Mario is actually a 30 year old female journalist living in Brooklyn.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/motoko_rich/index.html
Strange. Didn’t stop my first-generation Mexican mother from reading a whole lot of Jules Verne and H.G. Welles even though all the characters were white Brits.
Meh, don’t let this article make you think most Hispanics would back this up. Notice the race/locale of the author.
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