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by tatiana de la tierra

I just came home from a 4th of July barbecue in Glendale, California. Sipping on a mojito, I looked around and noted that, out of around 25 people, only three were born in the U.S. with direct roots in this country. The others born here are of Mexican descent. And then there were those of us born elsewhere--El Salvador, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and New Zealand. This is the U.S. I know, an international bilingual brew. To commemorate the red-white-and-blue, I dedicate today's bloga to all of us immigrants. We each have our story of getting here. This is mine.

"Wings" was originally published in Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class. Ed. Michelle Tea. Emeryville: Seal Press, 2004.

Placing a pink feather headband in my hand, my Abuelita Blanca kissed me good-bye, crying. I cried, too. I didn’t know why. The perpetually gray Bogotá skies joined in, sprinkling us with cold rain. I ran up the narrow metal staircase as wind bit my wet cheeks, into an airplane that would take me and my family far from Colombia. It was 1968 in May and I had just turned seven years old.

Thick, warm Atlantic air greeted us as we clambered, wide-eyed, out of our metal cocoon. The air in Miami was nothing like the air I knew in the Andean mountains. But being yanked from the love and protection of my aunts, grandmothers and great aunts was the most momentous change. It was bigger than air itself. I walked to the market with them, chit-chatted on the sidewalk, made corn arepas at the crack of dawn, collected eggs in the morning, accompanied them in the evening for hot chocolate. They cooked for me, bought dresses for me, introduced me to all their friends. But in Miami, everybody was a stranger.

At the airport I played with stairs that moved and doors that opened magically. A strange twig of a man who wore ripped denim and spoke halting Spanish greeted us. “Yo aquí para ayudarte,” he said, offering a warm handshake. Harvey was a friend of a friend of my dad’s; they embraced as if they already knew each other. My mom looked at him cautiously through her reddened eyes. Finally, she extended her hand.

Everything seemed brand new and shiny those first few days. All the blades of grass were uniformly green and stood properly on plush manicured lawns. The clean-shaven policemen wore immaculate starched uniforms and drove sleek cars crowned with blue and red domes that sometimes flashed and made wailing noises. Neat rows of containers housing exotic foods filled the spotless stores, where clerks counted crisp bills over Formica counters and gave back the change without stealing. Exquisite paintings graced cereal boxes and cans of soup, and luminous rays emanated from curvy Coca-Cola bottles branded with fire-red labels.

My father took me to a 7-11, where I marveled at the cans decorated with vivid color images of the foods they contained.
“This one, Papi,” I said. We both scrutinized the can. It had a picture of reddish brown beans on the label. Beans, a mainstay of our diet, had to be soaked in water the night before and took hours to cook. Yet there they were in the palms of our hands, ready to eat. We went home with the can. My father opened it and heated up the beans with some rice. I could tell they were different; they were watery and didn’t smell right. Still, I brought a spoonful to my mouth. I gagged as the flavor hit my palette. They were sweet. Beans were supposed to be salty and spiced with onions, garlic, tomato, and peppers. They were supposed to be thickened with green plantains. They were not supposed to be sweet or watery.

My mom, who disliked cooking and had little time for it, took advantage of the cheap and instant foods. She went grocery shopping and came home with Kool Aid, white bread, processed cheese, frozen chicken pot pies, sugar-coated cereals, and Hamburger Helper. The Colombian foods I was accustomed to—fresh bl

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: April 26, 2011

Inside Out & Back Again

by Thanhha Lai

Reading level: Ages 8-12

Hardcover: 272 pages

Publisher: HarperCollins (February 22, 2011)

Source: Publisher

What to expect: Vietnamese Americans, Emigration and immigration, Immigrants, Vietnam, Alabama

How much do we know about those around us? This is the question that debut novelist Thanhha Lai challenges her readers with.

Based on Lai’s own personal experience as a Vietnamese refugee, Inside Out & Back Again is a poignant story divided into four parts using a series of poems that chronicle the life of 10-year-old Hà, a child–refugee from Vietnam, during the year 1975—the Fall of Saigon. Along with her mother and three brothers (her father has been missing in action for nine years), Hà travels by boat to a tent city in Guam, is moved to Florida and then finds herself living in Alabama sponsored by an “American cowboy” and his wife. In Alabama, the family are treated as outcasts and forced to integrate quickly through language, food, and religion, to be accepted as a part of the community.

Adjustments to Hà’s new life are delivered through smells and tastes and touch. In “Part One: Saigon,” a verse titled “Two More Papayas” gives Hà’s delectable description of her most cherished fruit. In “Part Three: Alabama,” a verse titled “Not the Same,” which is followed by “But Not Bad,” showcases the bitter differences between the comfort of her precious birth city and the emotional challenges of her new home in Alabama, combined with the acceptance of change.

Two More Papayas

“…Middle sweet
between a mango and a pear.

Soft as a yam
gliding down
after three easy,
thrilling chews.”

Not the Same

“Three pouches of papaya

dried papaya

Chewy

Sugary

Waxy

Sticky

Not the same

at all.

So mad,

I throw all in the trash.”

But Not Bad

“… I wake up at faint light,

guilt heavy on my chest.

I head toward the trash can.

Yet

on the dining table

on a plate

sit strips of papaya

gooey and damp,

having been soaked in hot water.

The sugar has melted off

leaving

plump

moist

chewy

bites.

Hummm …

Not the same,

but not bad

at all.”

Told with pure honesty, emotions run freely from verse to verse and page to page. Hà’s voice is clear, allowing readers to make a leap from sympathy to deep seeded empathy by experiencing her joy, pain, anger, frustration, loyalties, challenges, loss, and determination. The clarity of Hà’s self-awareness and development toward self-actualization is reminiscent of Susan Patron’s character Lucky, also a 10-year-old girl, from the Newbery winner (2007) The Higher Power of Lucky (2006). Both characters suffer

It's been a while since I've done a picture book roundup and they've been piling up on my desk.  Here are a few new favorites:

When Dan grew up, he married Helen.  These are my grandparents.  Together Dan and Helen opened a market.  They sold all sorts of wonderful Italian food.  Now the little shovel belonged to Dan, and he used it to measure out beans, macaroni, and olives.

How do birds learn how to sing? What brings summer after spring? What turns leaves from green to brown and sends them floating gently down?

In the big red barn on the farm, on the farm, in the big red

1 Comments on April picture book roundup, last added: 4/6/2011

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Jeff Barger said, on 4/6/2011 10:12:00 AM

I'm always happy to see a new Dan Yaccarino title. This one looks particularly intriguing. All of these titles are new to me so I need to head to the library. Thanks for sharing!

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By Dennis Baron

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”     –Barack Obama

The bumper sticker on the back of a construction worker’s pickup truck caught my eye: “If you can read this, thank a teacher.”

This homage to education wasn’t what I expected from someone whose bitterness typically manifests itself in vehicle art celebrating guns and religion, but there was more: “If you can read this in English, thank a soldier.”

It was a “support our troops” bumper sticker that takes language and literacy out of the classroom and puts them squarely in the hands of the military.

It’s one thing to say that we owe our national security and the survival of the free world to military might. It’s something else again to be told that we need soldiers to protect the English language.

But according to this bumper sticker, any chink in our armor, any relaxation of our constant vigilance, any momentary lowering of the gun barrel, and we’ll all be speaking Russian, Iraqi, or even Mexican.

Supporters of official English argue that it’s the language of democracy — the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not to mention the “Star-Spangled Banner,” “American Idol” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” (it doesn’t matter that Millionaire was a British show first, since Americans were British once themselves). English, goes the claim, is the “social glue” cementing the many cultures that underlie American culture. As Teddy Roosevelt said back in 1918, “This is a nation, not a polyglot boarding house.”

But apparently even the official language laws that states, cities, schools and businesses have put in place aren’t doing the job, so what we really need is to put a gun to people’s heads to make them use English.

Only that won’t work. The large number of translators killed in Iraq, or drummed out of the army for being gay, are two of the many indicators that our armies aren’t keeping the world safe for English.

The linguist Max Weinreich is credited with quipping that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But guns can’t literally keep a language safe at home any more than they can effectively seal a border to keep other languages out.

In a bold act of regime change and a glaring breach of homeland security, French streamed across the English borders in the 11th century along with the Norman armies, but French soldiers were unable to convert most of the Brits they encountered to the parlez-vous, at least not in the long term.

And while the Royal Navy helped spread English around the globe as part and parcel of the British Empire, what really undergirds English today as an international language isn’t military might, but the appeal of global capitalism, science, computer technology, t-shirts, and good old rock ‘n

Drita, My Homegirl Jenny Lombard

Maxie's mother died three years ago and her dad is starting to date again, much to her dismay. She's acting out in little ways, including making fun of the new girl at school, Drita, and getting all the other kids to do it, too.

Drita's family just arrived in New York from Kosova*. She doesn't speak English, and her mother's cousin is still missing. Drita's mother's worry makes her mentally unwell, so Drita tells her everything is going great at school.

When the girls are assigned to work on a social studies project together, a friendship starts to form.

Told in alternating chapters, it's a simple, but ZOMG so wonderfully great story about two girls finding each other. They both have BIG THINGS going on in their lives, but they are also just kids, and the book is actually pretty funny. I'm a sucker for multiple narrators, and the Lombard does a good job of getting each voice right. There's the surface easiness-Drita's English is broken and studded with Albanian and Maxie's is urban sass, but the deeper motivations are there, too. You can tell that even if both girls had similar linguistic backgrounds, their voices would still be distinctly separate. I also really liked how the background info Kosova is worked in really well, but not to the point of overwhelming or getting in the way of the story.

This is one of those books that I was leafing through and just started reading and couldn't put it down. Even now, when I went to write the review, I went to look something up and ended up rereading the whole thing. It's just really, really well done.

*Drita tells us a few times that she knows when a non-Albanian is writing or talking about her home, because they call it Kosovo instead of Kosova, which is what she calls it, so, in honor of Drita, I've written Kosova here.

Book Provided by... my local library

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“A refugee’s life is never an easy one, but it’s especially tough on young people who are robbed of what should be the most formative, promising, and exciting years of their lives. At a time when they should be full of hopes and dreams for the future, they are instead faced with the harsh reality of displacement and privation. . .”
–United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

What I like about this book for middle grade readers is that it gives a voice to the war that students are always hearing about on television–especially in political news lately since the Obama administration is working to get troops out of Iraq. Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees isn’t about soldiers or political agendas or terrorists or presidents–it’s about the innocent victims of any war–children. I also like that this book, like last Monday’s book: Our New Home: Immigrant Children Speak , let’s the children’s voices be heard. The children and teens are telling their own stories.

In Children of War by Deborah Ellis, the author also gives some background to readers before each child’s essay/story, so that readers can understand important issues in the child’s story. For example, in the first story in the book from Hibba, 16, it is important for readers to understand that Islam is divided into different groups just like the Christian religion is (Catholic, Protestant, etc). Two of the Islam groups are Sunni and Shia. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim. In Hibba’s case, her mother is Sunni. Her father is Shia, and they are applying to live in the United States. Readers learn all of this information from Ellis’s introduction. Then, you hear Hibba’s story in her own words–about fleeing to Jordan, about her father being kidnapped and killed, about applying for asylum in the United States. Powerful stuff–especially for middle grade readers.

Here’s a quote from R, 18, that I think says a lot to children and adults. R. is an Iraqi Kurdish teenager living in Canada. He says: “When Canadian kids–the ones who have always been here and have a good life–start complaining to me about the little things that bother them, I just think, ‘You have no idea.’ ” And he lets you know what it’s like for him to be a refugee in his own words. Again–powerful stuff.

Books like Children of War by Deborah Ellis need to be shared with children of all ages. It takes education and understanding to solve these problems that war has created, to break down racial barriers, and to have sympathy/empathy for other people. These are stories of survival from the youngest victims. They can give anyone strength and hope.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the national immigration debate. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Immigration is likely to become the new theater of the culture wars because Arizona’s new immigration law has further nationalized the immigration issue. Illegal immigrants in the state would be more likely to move to nearby states like Texas and California, and especially to those cities where sanctuary ordinances have been passed. Since immigrants settle disproportionately in California, New York, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Illinois, we would expect these states to be most affected by Arizona’s new law.

Arizona is correct, then, that there can be no state solution to the illegal immigration problem. But that is not so say that the state is doing anything to alleviate the problem by taking things into its own hands. In fact, Arizona’s new law is only going to worsen the national problem.

What is missing in the contemporary debate is the asymmetry of support for legal sanctions against those who are here illegally, but not against those who hire illegally, namely businesses who hire illegal (and also lawyers and lobbyists who help them defend the conditions which make this possible). This puts the illegal immigrant in the worst of all worlds, harassed and harangued by the law, and in no position to bargain with prospective employers who are still relatively free to hire them at any price because of half-hearted enforcement of the Legal Arizona Workers Act. This puts downward pressure on wages, and even more native animus against illegal immigrants.

If Arizona is serious about controlling illegal immigration, it should proactively punish employers who hire illegals rather than focus its energies on a hit-and-miss strategy of authorizing law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of suspicious persons. This policy would then escape the “racial profiling” controversy because employers would have to check the immigration status of all potential employees (and not just those who look a certain way). It is somewhat disingenuous for Arizona to disproportionately target illegal immigrants but not legal citizens acting illegally, for at the very least this asymmetry about our tolerance of different kinds of illegality tells us that Arizona’s law isn’t purely about respect for the law qua law. Rather than focus on the supply of illegals, shouldn’t the state equally address the demand thereof?

The national immigration debate, which has currently centered on racial profiling, misses out on this central defect of federal immigration policy, which is that we focus too much on border security and not enough on the glaring fact that over a third of illegal immigrants became illegal because they over-stayed their visas, and the only reason why they could afford to do so was because they were able to find employment.

President Obama was wise, nevertheless, to have taken immigration reform off his agenda for this year, for if he hadn’t, Congress would have been forced to enact a quick-fix law that would have exacerbated the pathologies of our current immigration regime. In the long run, t

© Cecile Pineda 11 22 09

Cecile Pineda traveled to the East Coast to interview Jean Blum who volunteered in the detention centers of Passaic and Monmouth Counties in N.J. Beside documenting prison abuse, physical and verbal, inadequate diet, medical neglect, casual cruelty and disregard of their civil and human rights, Blum initiated one of the first official inquiries into the unrecorded death for lack of medical attention of immigrant detainee Tanveer Ahmad, a New York cabbie, and one of 106 such immigrant detainee deaths for lack of medical attention for which the ACLU and the New York Times obtained evidence through a Freedom of Information Act request. For the first installment of this series, click here.