DOI: 10.4324/9780203885208-6
Joel Spring (2004) states succinctly that “race is primarily a social construction” (Spring, 2004: 4). Spring goes on to sorrowfully point out that racism breeds violence and gives examples such as the Civil War, the Trail of Tears resulting in the deaths of thousands of Native Americans, the brutality leveled at African slaves, lynching, race riots, and on and on.
Many books for children have been written depicting the cataclysmic results of racisms. Some have capitulated to the myths of European American virtue and righteousness, while others have painted a more complex picture, helping readers to engage in active dialogue with the author, their peers, and concerned adults. This engagement, at its best, includes comparing histories, discerning ideologies, and questioning “factual” information.
Readers use critical multicultural analysis to interrogate the subject positions offered by the text and consider whether those positions perpetuate anti-democratic ideologies. In so doing they find themselves reflected, open themselves to viewing others, and unlock doors to offer alternative ways of organizing themselves as communities, cultures, and as a society. While a door invites readers to locate similarities and differences between themselves and those reflected in books, it also requires readers to understand how social difference is historically, socially, and discursively constructed. The door transforms diversity into a resource for action. The window provides access to each other’s stories as a way to begin to understand how dominant ideologies have worked to shape who we are as people, as well as how we have contributed to their circulation. The window opens to a view of unlearning and relearning. The door leads to how language can be implicated in social processes.
While critical multicultural analysis provides a window into the representation of multiculturalism in children’s literature, the door engages us with critical questions about culture, power, race, class, gender, and how children’s books position the reader. Why are some groups underrepresented in children’s literature? What social factors have contributed to their underrepresentation? In what ways have underrepresented groups resisted dominant ideologies and taken action?
This kind of reading has implications for resisting worldviews that privilege the dominant culture’s interests of those afforded with more social power based on race, class, and gender. Doors create opportunities for re-imagining power relations and organizing for collective action. Critical analysis is an entryway to locating dominant discourses and examining how they position us as readers. It is also a door to discourses that will lead us to more equitable ways of being in the world. The door opens to a space that permits us to consider movements of people in complicated ways.
North America (i.e., Canada, United States, and Mexico) was populated in a variety of ways. Although the evidence is sparse and Vine Deloria Jr. (1995) convincingly opposes the theory of the land bridge as inconclusive, and because of the tenuous nature of the theory, we should remain open to other theories. Historians and archaeologists suggest that the first peoples probably came from Asia; about 40,000 years ago across the land bridge that they believe then existed. The migration continued, with most of the groups traveling south, most likely following herds of wild game. It is estimated that some groups of people reached the southern tip of South America about 10,000 years ago.
At about the same time, it is proposed by some anthropologists that the northern land bridge became an ocean, so subsequent potential settlers had to travel by sea. There is some evidence in pottery and games played by ancient groups which indicates that people from Japan, China, and India may have made contact of some sort with the people of the Americas thousands of years ago.
Whatever the policy for labeling people as Native Americans, it is clear that in the fifteenth century when Europeans began colonizing the Americas there were already several millions of Indigenous people inhabiting the land. By the time Christopher Columbus reached the West Indies, many different peoples lived in North, Central, and South America. They spoke many different languages and practiced a variety of religions. Some groups farmed, others fished, and still others hunted. There were artists, engineers, and astronomers. The Aztecs of Central Mexico, who inhabited great stone cities, had developed a complex civilization. Mayans and Incas also were skilled craftspeople, scientists, and builders. Perhaps sixteen million people comprised the Inca Empire, which was larger than any kingdom in Europe at that time.
The Indigenous people of the United States were the first persecuted ethnic group on this continent. The persecution began with Columbus and continued with later European invaders, settlers, and governments. Although many European immigrants who sought religious freedom themselves had been subjugated, they became oppressors of Native Americans. They denigraded the religions and lifestyles of the Native peoples and did all that they could to forcibly convert the “heathen” to Christianity.
In 1804, the Cherokee nation was forced, unlawfully, to relinquish all of its lands and possessions. President Andrew Jackson overrode the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Cherokee nation and expanded the numbers of Native Americans who were forced to be removed to the West, including 13,000 Choctaws and 22,000 Creeks (Zinn, 1997: 105–106).
In 1887, the Allotment Act permitted the United States to divide all Indian lands into small allotments and make all land that remained after the Indians had received their shares available to White settlers.
Howard Zinn (1997) maintains that “the forces that led to removal did not come from the poor white frontiersmen who were neighbors of the Indians. They came from industrialization and commerce, the growth of populations, of railroads and cities, the rise in value of land, and the greed of businessmen. The Indians were to end up dead or exiled, the land speculators richer, the politicians more powerful” (Zinn, 1997: 103).
The European Americans pushed Indigenous peoples out of their homes in order to move westward and “settle” the land. They called themselves pioneers, when in fact they were invaders.
With the various Spanish incursions of the fifteenth century and continuing with English, Dutch, French, and Portuguese occupiers in the next several centuries, the population of the United States became a mix of Native peoples and Europeans. They were soldiers, religious people fleeing oppression, farmers, and fur trappers. There were also African slaves brought by Spanish settlers to the Caribbean beginning in 1517. The importation of slaves from Africa, mostly from countries on the west coast, introduced a large body of people who were not here for profit or adventure. They were not here of their own free will. Like the Native Americans, they spoke many different languages, came from divergent cultures, and practiced diverse religions.
In 1619, a Dutch ship brought the first African slaves to Virginia to work mostly in the cultivation of tobacco and rice. By about 1700 there were approximately 80,000 people of African origin in the colonies. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made slavery much more profitable. (It became feasible for much more cotton to be grown because of the ease with which the cotton gin could process it.) By 1860 there were almost 4 million slaves in the United States.
Spaniards came to the Americas first as conquerors and then as inhabitants. They brought African slaves to help with the hard work of cultivating the land and mining precious material. From 1819 to 1898, the United States acquired land controlled by Spain through a series of purchases and military conquests. It is noteworthy that, like the Native Americans and Africans, each of the Latino/a groups is different from the others in history, culture, and language (e.g., Brazilians speak Portuguese). Within each group, there is also wide diversity. The Latino/a population today of the United States includes approximately 21 million from Mexico, 3.5 million from Puerto Rico, 1.2 million from Cuba and 10 million from all other Latin American countries (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000b).
In 1917, Puerto Ricans were granted American citizenship without taking part in the decision. High unemployment on the island and unrestricted entry to the United States forced thousands of Puerto Ricans to seek work and better financial conditions on the mainland. Many Puerto Ricans go back and forth from the island to the mainland, and about one third resettle in Puerto Rico permanently.
Cubans are most readily welcomed into the United States when they claim political asylum. The 1 million Cubans residing in Florida are part of a vocal and active political community.
Since the seventeenth century, waves of people came as a result of searching for religious or political freedom, as victims of wars and socioeconomic oppression, or as seekers of economic opportunities and prosperity. Socioeconomic oppression and religious persecution were pervasive in Europe. Most of the European immigrants to the United States from 1607 onward were from England, Wales, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Holland as well as the French Huguenots, Dutch, Spaniards, and Portuguese Jews.
Five million people emigrated from Western Europe between the 1820s and the 1850s. This mass migration doubled the existing U.S. population. The Industrial Revolution forced many farmworkers out of their homes. In Ireland, two factors figured strongly in a surge of immigration: the conversion by the British landowners of farmland to sheep-grazing land (because the sale of wool was more profitable than the sale of produce) and the potato blights that destroyed a significant source of food. Certain socially made conditions allowed for the potato blight to spread; it was not the first famine to take place in Ireland nor was it just a natural disaster. English domination over the Irish offered a blueprint for the deculturalization of people of color in the United States (Spring, 2004).
At this time, many Irish people immigrated to the United States and became domestic servants and laborers on canals, roads, and railroads.
When the Irish arrived in the United States, like all immigrant groups who came because of economic oppression, they were met with racism. They were considered disposable labor compared to the valuable slave labor and given the most dangerous jobs (Ignatiev, 1995).
During this time, many people from Southern Germany and the German Swiss areas came for economic reasons and settled in great numbers in the Midwest and in Pennsylvania. They favored occupations such as butcher, carpenter, shoemaker, and other skilled work. In this same period, people continued to come from Great Britain. Some of them opened commercial enterprises such as textile mills and pottery factories.
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants arrived on the West coast in response to the need for laborers to build railroads and work in mines. By 1880, approximately 105,000 Chinese laborers lived in the United States. They were often victims of violence and hatred. After the Civil War, new waves of immigrants, mostly from Western Europe, settled in the lands west of the Mississippi. This contributed to the wresting of more land from the Indigenous peoples.
In 1882, sentiment against Chinese immigrants reached such proportions that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, suspending Chinese immigration for the next ten years. (It was followed by more exclusionary laws that were not repealed until 1943.) At that time, Japanese immigrants were not banned, and from 1885 to the turn of the century, Japanese emigrated in large numbers, mostly to Hawaii and California. In 1890, about 2,000 Japanese lived in the United States. In 1907, because of pressure exerted by people afraid of losing their jobs to low-paid Japanese laborers, and because of an irrational fear of a “yellow peril,” the United States and Japan negotiated what was euphemistically called a “gentlemen’s agreement.” The Japanese government agreed to forbid laborers to immigrate to the United States for a period of two years.
Anti-Japanese sentiment accelerated in the twentieth century and reached a height at the onset of the Second World War when internment camps imprisoned more than 110,000 Japanese Americans (only recently has Congress officially admitted wrong doing). With Hawaii becoming the fiftieth state in 1960 came greater acceptance of Japanese people. The 2000 census reported that there are almost 850,000 Japanese Americans living in the United States.
Not until the late nineteenth century did emigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe arrive. Availability of jobs in the United States was probably the major attraction. Steamship lines permitted travel at affordable cost. Italians, Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Finns, and Croats came largely for economic reasons. Many Jews fled Russia as a result of the pogroms (organized annihilation of entire settlements of Jews) and because of virulent and violent anti-Semitism in the other countries of Europe. Turks, Armenians, and people from the Balkans also came to escape religious and ethnic persecution.
In 1980, the pressure to admit people escaping from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia impelled Congress to pass the Refugee Act allowing thousands to enter. Although this act was intended to correct the imbalance of political forces affecting acceptance of refugees according to the World Refugee Survey of 1992, 99.8 percent of the refugees admitted to the United States since 1980 have come from countries hostile to the United States.
Working class immigrant groups in the twentieth century encountered suspicion, resentment, and rejection from people who had come before them. U.S. immigration laws reflected these biased attitudes. A literacy requirement for citizenship was imposed on all new immigrants, and restrictions were increased against Asian immigration. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act limited emigration from each country to 2 percent of the number in the United States in 1890, with the total not to exceed 150,000. This act was intended to sharply limit “undesirable” populations from immigrating in great numbers.
The quota system was eliminated in 1965. In its place, variable ceilings were set annually for immigrants from North and South America and from the rest of the world. By 1991, the United States was accepting more immigrants and refugees than all other countries combined: about 700,000 each year, about 140,000 of them being refugees. Most now come from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
The 2000 U.S. Census Bureau (2000b) counted over 10 million Asian Americans (a three-million increase since 1990), about 35 million Latino/a people (a 13-million increase since 1990), about 2.5 million Native Americans (a half million increase from 1990), and about 34.5 million African Americans (constituting 4.5-million increase since 1990). European Americans constitute approximately 211 million of the total population of approximately 281.5 million (an 11-million increase since 1990). By 2050, it is estimated that U.S. demographics will shift in the following ways: the Latino/a and Asian/Pacific Islander populations may triple; African American population may increase by 70 percent; the European American population may increase by 9 percent; and the immigrant population probably will double (from 26 to 53.8 million). These projections are based on childbearing, mortality, and migration patterns but do not consider possible future changes in the ways people may identify themselves as they report their race and ethnicity (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000a).
The predictions about the changing demographics of the United States are coming true. It is expected that the Asian population will increase tenfold and Latino/as threefold in the next 50 years, and that by 2070, European Americans will probably be a minority. It is all the more necessary (albeit not sufficient), therefore, that children’s literature reflect as many hues, backgrounds, and cultures as possible, so as to provide both mirrors and windows for young people as well as for adults.
We are trying to make visible the process of how this country was peopled and what happened when different cultural groups came together. The process was marked by the differences in and among the populations. Some groups, such as the Irish, came voluntarily but out of desperation. From the beginning, Native American nations lived in what is now the United States and remained as nations despite almost genocidal oppression. People whose homes originated from across the African continent were forced to come and were enslaved. These cultural groups represent decidedly different histories and sociopolitical situations. It is important for us not to idealize or essentialize these cultural groups. We need to acknowledge the diversity of experiences within each diasporic experience.
We are concerned about the oversimplification of the designation of race as the key element that distinguishes one group from another. We are firmly committed to the understanding that there is only one race, the human race, and that more than the differences of skin color, facial features, and characteristics of hair distinguish individuals from each other. On the other hand, we want to acknowledge that the social construct of race alongside class and gender and the values attendant upon them shape how we are organized as a society in the United States.
The discourse of the American Dream, an ideology historically rooted in the “founding” of the “New World,” romanticizes the workings of capitalism and tries to avoid the power relations of race, gender, and class. This social myth developed at the same time as the decline of European feudalism (Wang, 2000). The American Dream promised the possibility that all Americans could attain material prosperity through their own initiative and hard work. The persistence of the self-made ideology, which fueled the “from-rags-to-riches” paradigm, enticed many generations of immigrants to attempt success in “the land of opportunity.” But this self-made success had a social cost that continues to this day.
Jeffrey Louis Decker argues that the American Dream is “U.S. capitalism’s master trope” (Decker, 1990: 1). He claims that, even though this social vision has been part of American culture since the mid-nineteenth century, the term emerged after James T. Adams (1931) published “Our American Dream,” what Decker calls, “a treatise on how to make the Dream ‘come true’ ” during the Great Depression (Decker, 1990: 1). This essay tried to defuse the class struggle and class consciousness emerging during this economic crisis in the United States, a crisis that was historically and politically made. The ideology of the American Dream blames socio-economic inequities on the individual. The American Dream represses historical memory and promotes a permeable power structure that supposedly benefits all people.
The American Dream has summoned many immigrants to the United States. Immigration and diaspora are two ways to categorize these movements of people. Immigration signifies the moving from one country to another, to take up permanent residency. Many social factors contribute to people’s departure from one country for another: ethnic cleansing, socio-economics and political circumstances, religious bigotry, and reunion with families and communities.
Voluntary emigration conjures up images of White Europeans (e.g., Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Portuguese) leaving their homelands. This image excludes many cultural groups. In many instances choice is implied in this term because of voluntary movement in response to economic oppression, or religious or political unrest. It is difficult to find appropriate terminology to explain the phenomenon of not-quite-voluntary relocation. Also needed is language to describe the implications of the homeland governments and their roles in the flight of their citizens. Because we think it accounts for this phenomenon, we have chosen the term diaspora, which acknowledges the integration of race, class, and gender, as well as considering multiple cultural experiences.
According to the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, published by Houghton Mifflin, diaspora is “the dispersion or spreading of something that was originally localized (as a people or language or culture).” The diaspora construct rejects that there is one U.S. history, and considers not only diversity, but also social difference and its construction. With diaspora, the homeland has a vested interest in scattering the targeted population.
We are drawn to the United States as a locus of diaspora because this concept takes into account the multiple power relations people participate in: local, national, and global. The study of diaspora reveals social processes (e.g., negotiation and recreation) and their complexities and dynamism.
Diaspora creates a space to name race, class, and gender. Emma Pérez (1999) maintains that a “diasporic subjectivity” differs from an immigrant one. She claims that race cannot be as easily overlooked from diaspora:
Diasporic subjectivity opens a space where people of color [can] negotiate a raced culture within many kinds of identities without racial erasure through assimilation, accommodation, adaptation, acculturation, or even resistance—all of which have been robbed of their decolonial oppositional subjectivity under the rubric of immigrant. Immigrants are expected to become part of the dominant culture; they are urged to adopt its habits and forget their own—to erase. Diasporas, on the other hand, intervene, construct newness, and call upon these complex diasporic subjectivities that “live inside with a difference”.
(Pérez 1999: 78)
The diaspora foregrounds the responses of peoples as they live through these sociopolitical processes and exercise power on a daily basis, in efforts to reconstruct themselves and reconstruct culture.
In thinking about the United States as a diaspora, we reject simplistic binary oppositions of the colonizing and the colonized in historical and contemporary times. Like Carlos Tejeda, Manuel Espinoza, and Kris Gutierrez (2003), we align ourselves with a complex view of these power relations by acknowledging:
Not all European groups have colluded with “colonial/neocolonial relations of domination and exploitation” (Tejada, Espinoza, Gutierrez, 2003) nor have all European groups been privileged by these conditions (hooks, 2000). Conversely, social domination is not experienced in the same way by all Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and other people of color.
The concept of diaspora considers these social circumstances and re/ contextualizes these cultural experiences within their histories. History offers new possibilities for looking at our collective subjectivities (cultural identities) and examines how social difference is a consequence of power. Lawrence Grossberg maintains that “diaspora emphasizes the historically spatial fluidity and intentionality of identity, its articulation to structures of historical movements (whether forced or chosen, necessary or desired)” (Grossberg, 1996: 92). He continues: “Subjectivity as spatial is perhaps the clearest, for it involves taking literally the statement that people experience the world from a particular position—recognizing that such positions are in space rather than (or at least as much as in) time …” (Grossberg, 1996: 100). The construct of diaspora recognizes these dimensions.
Nation and culture develop out of social practice. Culture is the product of historical and sociopolitical processes. Nationhood is performed by the nation’s members; it does not develop naturally over time but through historical and sociopolitical forces that contribute to its construction. Homi Bhabha describes these processes as “a double narrative movement”—both pedagogical and performative (Bhabha, 1990: 297). The pedagogical signifies the historical background (the tradition) of a people and the recognized identity of a nation. The performative process is the dynamic in which a nation’s population participates in the construction of the country’s collective subjectivity. Cultural products such as children’s literature play a role in “narrating the nation” and must be studied against historical and sociopolitical contexts, with an awareness of the social construction of nation and culture. Critical multicultural analysis can peel away at the layers of these constructions.
In this chapter, we have examined the processes by which Europeans, Asians, Latinos/as, Native peoples, and African slaves came together under the umbrella of the United States. What follows is a re/contextualization of Mexican American representation in children’s literature by examining the historical and sociopolitical circumstances of Mexican American participation in the U.S. farmworker system by historicizing representation over time. The social, discursive, and political constructions of genres, narrative processes (characterization), and story closure will be considered in this process of re/contextualization; that is, understanding this text collection against historical, sociopolitical, and discursive conditions.
Although we acknowledge the rich culture of the Mexican people, for the purpose of this text, we are focusing on the contemporary Mexican American, from the time of the invasion and the annexing of Mexican territory by the U.S. army. The Mexican American experience began historically in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This historical event marks a sociopolitical shift in identity. Before this date, the Mexican population was socially and economically diverse as well as geographically scattered. The response to U.S. conquest was also diverse (Almaguer, 1989): What came to bind the Mexican Americans to each other was a history of power relations between the dominant Anglo-American culture and the fledgling Mexican American culture. This history informs the rendering and interpretation of the Mexican American experience in children’s literature. Economic and racial oppression, political inequality, and educational deculturalization mark this history. Mexican Americans were/are a heterogeneous group with class and cultural associations and disassociations, which dramatically shape/d the diversity in ethnic identification and social position. These historical processes are complex.
Mexican American historian Tomás Almaguer argues that “both the class and racial oppression of the Chicano, and of other colonized people of color, have stemmed from the organization of the economic structure of U.S. capitalism and from the labor relationships that generate from that particular mode of production” (Almaguer, 1974: 43). The migrant agricultural labor system is a by-product of economic exploitation.
Almaguer (1989) contends that the racial examination of the colonizing processes obscures the class divisions that existed prior to 1848 and hides “the class nature of this racial conflict” (Almaguer, 1974: 12). For example, according to Almaguer, these historical accounts fail to document the enslavement of the Indian population in the ranchero-based system. In addition, the class system in place before Anglo contact was greatly divided along racial lines. The focus on Anglo-Mexican relations overshadows the experiences of other underrepresented Southwest groups. The labor systems were complex: “These included the coercive labor system associated with the Mexican rancho economy, other pre-capitalist labor systems such as slavery and indentured servitude, the marginalized communal economy of the Indian population, and the free wage-labor system of the rapidly ascending capitalist economy” (Almaguer, 1974: 17). Almaguer (1989) maintains that it does not mean that Chicanos were on equal economic footing with the Anglo-American population, but that historical evidence shows that they were relegated to the bottom of the “emerging capitalist economic order” (Almaguer, 1989: 17). Mexicans became socially defined against blackness, which “destabilized [this] political alliance built out of resistance to an oppressive economic regime” (Guinier & Torres, 2002: 230). Mexicans did/do not fit into the black/white paradigm.
Overall, Mexicans were considered “more structurally assimilable” than other minority groups because they, for the most part, were a Christian people, spoke a romance language, had a politically powerful upper class, the female population intermarried with Whites, and, because of their Spaniard ancestry, were perceived as White. Their social position significantly changed with a great influx of immigrants in the early decades of the twentieth century. The significant feature of the twentieth-century Chicano experience in California is marked by “the proletarianization of the Mexican population that immigrated to the United States during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s” (Almaguer, 1989: 24). In these early decades of the 1900s, main conflicts occurred between the Mexican and Anglo-American working classes.
Mexico was/is a class and race divided society. In the earlier 1900s, Mexicans were “pushed north by the Mexican government’s radical dismantling of traditional communal landownership, which forced 5 million rural Mexicans—over 97 percent of the campesino population—off their land” (Rothenberg, 1998: 32). The agricultural industry absorbed many Mexican documented and undocumented immigrants during this period. Rodolfo Acuña (1988) argues that “Mexican labor … built the Southwest” (Acuña, 1988: 141), especially the expansion in agricultural production. The immigration laws such as the 1908 Gentleman’s Agreement and the 1924 Immigration Act, which excluded Asian labor, further facilitated the increase in Mexican agricultural labor. Many farmers preferred Mexican farmworkers because they were “more humble and you [got] more for your money” (Takaki, 1993: 321).
The First World War brought an increase in Mexican migration to the United States due to the labor needs of “the war economy.” The U.S. government created programs to promote Mexican migration across the border. Many of these immigrants worked in agriculture. Mexican migration, motivated by this “push-pull process” (McWilliam, 1968 as cited in Gonzales, 1999: 114), accounts for one of the largest mass migrations in human history: Acuña (1988) maintains that one-tenth of Mexico’s population migrated north from the early 1900s up to the Great Depression. The Mexican Revolution, which began 1910, created social, political, and economic forces that contributed to this influx of immigrants.
The Mexican International Railroad facilitated mass migration. According to Ronald Takaki (1993), the Mexican population in the Southwest swelled from approximately 375,000 to 1,160,000 between 1900 and 1930, with Mexican nationals as the majority. The greatest stream of people moved during the 1920s, when approximately half a million Mexicans entered the United States. Many of these people settled in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. During the Great Depression, Chicanas/os actively participated in labor struggles. For example, in 1933, 12,000 farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley protested wage cuts. In 1929, the federal government passed the Deportation Act, which gave counties power to send Mexicans back to Mexico. Many U.S.-born citizens were sent back in the Immigration Bureau’s many sweeps. Between 1929 and 1935, approximately 450,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans were relocated to Mexico, one of the largest involuntary migrations in the United States.
During the Second World War, the possibility of farm labor shortages was imminent because many poor White workers were entering the military or finding better jobs in the war economy. The U.S. government instituted a “guest worker system” in 1942 called the Bracero1 Program, a “managed migration” (Gonzales, 1999: 174). Over a 22-year period, this program brought 4 to 5 million Mexican workers into the United States to work in the agricultural industry (Rothenberg, 1998). This program supplied farmers with “cheap, docile, and disposable farm laborers from Mexico” (del Castillo & De León, 1996: 127). Manuel G. Gonzales (1999) claims that the duration of the Bracero Program speaks to the substantial power held by U.S. agribusiness.
While the Bracero Program was in place, it obstructed unionization efforts because it permitted a free flow of labor from the South. The U.S. government ended this program in 1965. The termination of this federal program created a space for the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, “the most ambitious unionization attempt to date” (Gonzales, 1999).
The United Farm Workers, first named the National Farm Workers Union, was founded in Fresno, California, on September 30, 1962 by César Chávez, a former migrant farmworker, and Dolores Huerta, a former schoolteacher. Since union activities accommodated families, women played a key role in securing better wages and work conditions, and access to health and dental care.
The Delano grape strike, initiated by a Filipino farmer’s union, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, was UFW’s first project. Since most of the farmworkers in the area were Mexican, Chávez was invited to join forces. Greatly influenced by Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he passionately believed in nonviolence. The UFW allied themselves with other trade unions and religious organizations. Along with these alliances, the UFW has organized, striked, boycotted, protested, marched, and fasted against unjust agricultural labor practices. To this day, the UFW struggles to organize farm labor.
The Chicano movimiento of the 1960s failed to include the farmworkers’ concerns of labor exploitation in their cause (Rosales, 1997). El movimiento participants embraced a middle-class Mexican American agenda: education and social mobility, whereas the Mexican workers had “bread-and-butter concerns” (Rosales, 1997: 112). In addition, Arturo Rosales argues that “movimiento participants did not dwell on unionization because its success depended on a working-class consciousness that required collaboration with [W]hite workers—an unattractive option during these very nationalistic times” (Rosales, 1997: 112).
Documented immigration from Mexico in the 1970s averaged 60,000 per year. Pressure by agribusiness resulted in legislation to allow more Mexicans to enter the country as “guest workers.” The human flow between the two countries can be attributed to economic factors, the decline of extended family networks, family reunification efforts, and antiIndian policies and practices in Mexico. More women now immigrate with their families. In addition, many of the recent immigrants from Mexico are refugees from Central America (Gonzalez, 1999). The push-pull explanation no longer applies. Immigration patterns are more complex. For example, many families maintain dual residence, establishing “a transnational migrant circuit” (Rouse, 1989 as cited in Gonzalez, 1999: 228).
Mexican Americans are the largest growing ethnolinguistic group in the United States. In the March 2002 “Current Population Survey” of the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinas/os2 comprised 13.3% (37.4 million) of the U.S. population, of which 66.9% (25.1 million) were Mexican3 people who mostly resided in the American Southwest. One-third of the Latina/o population was under age 18, with Mexicans/Chicanos having the largest proportion (37.1) of people under this age. One-quarter of Latina/o children lived in poverty. Latina/o families were more likely to live in poverty and be unemployed than “non-[Latina/o] White” families: Mexicans/Chicanas/os had the second highest rate (8.4%) of unemployment, with Puerto Ricans experiencing the highest rate (9.6%).
Approximately 76 percent of Mexicans/Chicanas/os, who are full-time year-round workers, earned less than $35,000. Latinas/os have the lowest formal education attainment rate in the United States, with twenty-five-year-old and older Mexicans/Chicanas/os having the lowest proportion of people with a high school diploma, bachelor’s degree or higher education. In a 2000 survey about languages spoken at home, over 28 million people (the U.S. population was 262.4 million), who were 5 years old and over, spoke Spanish or Spanish Creole (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). Out of this total, 8,105,505 speakers of Spanish resided in California. Sánchez states: “One of the salient characteristics of Chicano literature is its dialogue with history and its focus on collective subjectivity” (Sánchez, 1992: 73). The representation of the Mexican American experience in children’s literature further illuminates the depiction of the migrant farmworker system.
The Mexican—U.S. border stretches two thousand miles across sand, scrub, brush-strewn yellow dirt, and the dark waters of the Rio Grande. Many of the characters in the text collection cross this border or refer to its presence as a marker that signals the socioeconomic divide that exists within and between Mexico and the United States. However, this border is sociopolitically made, and historically speaking, as Maria José Fernández (2003) maintains, the border crossed the people; that is, the American Southwest once belonged to Mexico and was taken over by military force by the United States.
In his most recent book, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Chicano scholar Richard Rodriguez (2002) explains that brown is understood in Latin America as “a reminder of conflict”: “I am made of the conquistador and the Indian” (Rodriguez, 2002: xii). North of the U.S—Mexico border, “the future is brown” (Rodriguez, 2002: 35). Brown becomes a verb—the “browning” of the United States. South of the border brown signals a history. Brown is beyond “the founding palette” of Red, Black, and White. The border is a metaphor for shifting identities and geopolitical status.
Many scholars argue that Mexican American children’s literature needs to be interpreted against a historical and sociopolitical backdrop of the Mexican American experience, starting in 1848, the political moment that is used to mark the beginning of Mexican American identity. But literature existed before this historical moment and continued after this conquest. It is worth noting that, most recently, Arte Público Press initiated the Recovery Project, a comprehensive program to reconstitute the literary history of Latinos/as in the United States from colonial times to 1960.
No Mexican American children’s literature was published prior to 1940; however, an oral literary tradition was present before and after this historical period and a number folk tales were published as picture books. Unfortunately, cultural homogeneity and historical distortion pervade through the representation of Mexican Americans in children’s literature. The stereotypic rendering began in 1940: It was a “pastoral view” (Cortes, 1992) of what Mexicans, not Mexican Americans, looked and acted like.
Between 1940 to 1970 approximately six books a year on Mexican American themes and content were published. The Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC) (1975) argues that this number is inflated since many of the 140 books they surveyed were not about Chicano culture, but about Mexico and Mexicans “adventuring in the United States [and] about characters with Spanish names” (CIBC, 1975: 7). Of the 60 nonfiction books examined in this investigation, only 15 were about the Mexican American experience and the Southwest. Given these figures, a more accurate estimate for annual publishing would be about one to three books per year for this time period, Latino children’s literature scholars Barrera, Liguori and Salas (1993) maintain.
In 1975 the CIBC initiated the first comprehensive study of the representation of Mexican Americans in children’s literature. Their findings were published in the Interracial Books for Children Bulletin (1975). (The Council simultaneously published this survey in Spanish in La Luz, a magazine based in Denver, Colorado.) The survey included 200 children’s books on Chicano/a themes, published from 1940 to 1970. Anglo writers wrote all the books examined. Out of the 200 volumes 140 books were fiction. CIBC’s intent was to analyze books for racist and sexist content. The survey findings show a general pattern of cultural misrepresentation and stereotypic depiction.
Many of the strong undercurrents in these books reveal race and class biases. The common cultural themes include the “poverty plot,” generated by two assumptions held by Anglo authors: “(1) the assumption of Mexican and Chicano quaintness, ignorance and inferiority; and (2) the assumption of Anglo benevolence and the unquestioned superiority of the Anglo American way of life”; “poor, ignorant, helpless Mexican is saved by a benevolent Anglo”; “Chicano gets his wish, but selflessly sacrifices it”; “striving Chicano (pushes for an education)”; and “adventures of the migrant worker,” that is, Mexicans depicted as going north to the “land of opportunity,” whereas Chicanos born in the United States are portrayed as “leading a rootless life following the crops” (CIBC, 1975: 8). Implicit in all of these recurrent themes is that acculturation is inevitable and the “only possible road to [a] better life” (CIBC, 1975: 8): A pressure to be “American,” while leaving the Mexican American culture and Spanish language behind, is central to these texts.
The Spanish language and English language learning are carelessly treated in these texts: There are translation mistakes and the stereotypical portrayal of the English speech of people whose first language is Spanish. In these books, poverty is consistently one of the main characters and “a literary device” (Hade, personal communication, July 2002), that is, a technique to tell a story, and, as CIBC maintains, realistic fiction became a stereotype of a cultural group (CIBC, 1975).
A smaller study conducted by Shirley A. Wagoner, published in The Reading Teacher in December 1982, examines books published since 1970, with the majority produced between 1970 and 1973. Wagoner claims only a handful of books were published after 1974. She outlines the recurring themes: family life and education. Stories portray families as large and close-knit. Education promises the fulfillment of personal and social goals. She found stories more complex than the books published prior to 1970; the texts feature three-dimensional protagonists constrained by their “cultural circumstances.” The particularities of family life are interpreted as cultural ways, instead of the ways families respond to a racist and classist society. These books generally portray most Mexican Americans as migrant farmworkers, even though, in 1973, 80 percent of the Mexican American population lived in urban centers (Eiseman, 1973: 64 as cited in Wagoner, 1982).
During the early 1980s Mexican American culture was invisible in children’s literature, but a shift occurred toward the second half of this decade and early 1990s. The shift can be attributed to a small number of Chicana/o writers who began writing for children (e.g., Gary Soto, Rudolfo Anaya, Sabine Ulibarrí, Carmen Tafolla, and Pat Mora) and Mexican-American-owned and small alternative presses’ publishing activity. Their works of fiction reflected the complexities of the Mexican American community, cross-cultural friendships, biracial families, connections between traditional and contemporary themes, and blended story elements from multiple cultures, as well as including codeswitching in text and bilingual text (Spanish/English) editions.
This shift in writing captured the “subtle and not-so-subtle intra-group differences,” foregrounding the commonalities that bind the Mexican American community as an ethnic group (Barrera, Liguori, & Salas, 1993: 223). The genres represented in these developments were fiction and poetry. According to these scholars, nonfiction representation offered a more balanced treatment of the Mexican American community during the 1980s and into the 1990s. European American authors wrote most of these texts. During this time, many omissions still existed in the areas of biographies and historical accounts. Rosalinda B. Barrera, Olga Liguori, and Loretta Salas (1993) argue that storylines exist to move along “the parade of cultural information,” that is, Mexican American characters are superficially depicted, with European American children as the targeted audience (Barrera, Liguori, & Salas, 1993: 211).
Their survey of 1980 to 1991 marks a period of substantial improvement in the representation of Mexican Americans in children’s literature. Barrera, Liguori, and Salas (1993: 208) recommend some “seeds for growing a ‘new literature’ ” that they claim can considerably improve Chicana/o children’s literature:
Their recommendations signal that the Mexican American experience is dynamic, diverse, complex, contradictory, multiple, and shifting, a complex definition of culture.
Who gets to write about the Mexican American culture? Oralia Garza de Cortes (1992: 123) notes that “authors from outside the culture have generally been more successful in writing nonfiction, which relies upon factual research and the quality of its presentation, than in depicting the subtle aspects of language, experience, and emotion necessary for a compelling work of fiction.” In their study, Barrera, Liguori, and Salas (1993) locate misinformation or “cultural errors” as well as a cultural barrenness—an “acultural rendering,” that is, the story includes some Latino names and a dash of Spanish words. Barrera, Liguori, and Salas (1993: 218) purport that “cultural authenticity will follow and flow naturally when the doors to children’s literature are opened to writers from underrepresented cultures, when different perspectives and different voices are encouraged and supported.” Insider authors may be more apt to portray power relations up close instead of stereotyping and/or decontextualizing people and their behaviors; they situate social processes. Capturing these social subtleties brings the reader closer to how the power relations of class, race, and gender are exercised in microinteractions.
Joined by Oralia Garza de Cortes, another scholar of Latino children’s literature, Rosalinda B. Barrera (1997) conducted research on the Mexican American in children’s literature from 1992 to mid-1995, a period marked by increased activity in multicultural publishing. The text sample consisted of 67 books published in the United States. They also examined 50 books published about Mexican culture and experience to garner any subtle information that would illuminate their analysis. At this point, the annual average increased from 6 books per year to 19. These scholars argue that this is a small increase given the growth in the overall multicultural children’s literature publishing, and in U.S. children’s publishing in general, and the increased growth of the Mexican American population.
In this early-to-mid-1990s survey, fiction outnumbers nonfiction by a ratio of 2.35 to 1. Eighty-two percent of the fiction books take place in contemporary times, and the remaining books deal with the past. Authors of Mexican American heritage created approximately a third of these titles (23 books). Gary Soto, a Mexican American author, wrote almost half of these books (11 titles).
These books reflect an increased use of Spanish in the text: bilingual editions with English and Spanish texts alongside each other or “interlingual,” incorporating Spanish words and phrases within the English text. With this increase in Spanish, also different dialects of Spanish are included.
Across their text sample they found the following themes: holidays/ special days (e.g., Christmas, Day of the Dead, and birthdays), migrants, immigrants (documented and undocumented), and foods. While these developments demonstrate an increase of a more complex representation of Mexican American, some “chronic” stereotypes persist: “(a) Mexican Americans are an ‘exotic’ and ‘foreign’ people … (b) Mexican Americans are a readily identifiable group within a narrow band of society” (Barrera & Garza de Cortes, 1997: 135). The latter stereotype discounts the intragroup diversity of the Mexican American people: migrants and immigrants are one fraction of the whole. Thus a large portion of this cultural group remains invisible in the world of children’s literature.
The Mexican American story includes more complex views of family life, while not submitting to the stereotypes that all Chicano families are large and splintered. These family portrayals have moved into urban contexts and not just rural, farm settings. While these stories move away from stereotyping family life, some distortions still endure: ethnocentricism (assumption that the dominant culture is superior), “overloading”, romanticism, and “typecasting.” “Overloading” is the return of the “cultural parade” where customs and traditions are strung together without a story line in place. The “myth of U.S. opportunity” is imbedded in these stories where the characters speculate on better lives in the United States. There also exists an overemphasis on the urbane Santa Fe style as representative of Mexican American culture. Romanticism signifies a lack of sociopolitical information to offer a deeper understanding of the social arrangements. Typecasting refers to recurring social positioning of Mexican Americans as particular character types in particular roles.
Barrera and Garza de Cortes (1997) attribute the more complex rendering of the Mexican American identity to the writing by insider authors. They cite a dearth of biographies about Mexican Americans who have made significant contributions to the Mexican American community and U.S. society, as well as the lack of histories of important events in the Mexican American experience.
In 1999, Rosalinda Barrera, with her collaborators Ruth E. Quiroa and Cassiette West-Williams, published their analysis of Mexican American children’s literature produced from late 1995 to late 1998. Ninety-two books were identified for analysis, a 37 percent increase from the previous study and an annual increase from 19 to 31. Fifty-eight percent of the sample was fiction (54 books), with 22 percent biography, representing .5 percent of the total amount of children’s books published annually in the United States. Nineteen books have bilingual text and 10 of the 19 have separate editions written in Spanish. The majority of the texts were written in English. Some of these books include a sprinkling of Spanish words and phrases, with glossaries providing translation for the new vocabulary.
The overarching theme in the primary grade books is the importance of family and intergenerational ties. Other themes include childhood memories, growing up and gaining confidence, cultural transition involving school, and celebrations. The books for middle school age readers consist of similar themes about family and family issues. Other themes were coming-of-age and survival struggles; intercultural conflict; overcoming personal issues; and cultural maintenance and change.
Most books, at both levels, take place in contemporary times. Gary Soto (7 titles), Pat Mora (4 titles), and Olivia Dumas Lachtman (4 titles) were the principal authors for this time period. One third of the children’s books published in this period of time were produced by small independent publishers such as Arte Público Press, Piñata Books, an imprint of the aforementioned publishing house, and Children’s Book Press. These small presses specialize in Latino and multicultural texts for children.
Barrera, Quiroa, and West-Williams (1999: 322) comment that the fiction published during this period is “a significant core of young adult fiction books which combine gripping content, cultural authenticity, and skilled writing.” Among these texts is Francisco Jiménez’s book, The Circuit. These scholars contend that Jiménez moves away from a romanticized depiction of migrant life, oftentimes rendered in children’s and young adult literature. Jiménez conveys the interdependence of the family members with accuracy. He weaves Spanish words, phrases, and sentences, letting in the subtleties of the Spanish language, as only an insider can, note the scholars. Gathering the Sun, written by Alma Flor Ada and illustrated by Simón Silva, which conveys “respect and dignity for the nation’s Mexican American migrant farmworkers,” was also published during this period (Barrera, Quiroa, & West-Williams, 1999: 325). Originally written in Spanish, this book showcases the Spanish alphabet. Migrant Worker: a Boy from the Rio Grande Valley, written by Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith and photographed by Lawrence Migdale, also was published during this period. This photo-essay documents the hardworking life of Ricky, an eleven-year-old boy.
The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) publishes statistics on books about or by Latinos from 1994 to 2007. On average about 70 books have been published annually. CCBC attributes these steady publishing trends to an increase of books written by Latino/a authors and the publishing activities of small presses. In addition, the Américas, Pura Belpré, and Tomás Rivera awards have brought recognition to the work of Latina/o writers.
The historical and sociopolitical context of Mexican American representation in children’s literature and the Chicana/o participation in the U.S. migrant farmworker system re/contextualizes these historical and sociopolitical conditions, which offers a backdrop to analyze the content of the text collection. Critical multicultural analysis also demands that readers consider the role form plays on the content of a text. In the next chapter, the social construction of genres as realistic fiction, poetry, picture books, nonfiction narratives, as well as the discursive shaping of characters and ideological implications of the story closure are examined in a text collection about Mexican American farmworkers.
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