If a children’s book makes a splash on the news or social media these days for being under threat of bans from libraries, there’s almost a guarantee that the book deals with racially diverse characters, any mention LGBTQ+ issues, or both.
It’s in this environment that a new collection of books was recently released, one designed for elementary school classrooms. Each bundle in this new Rising Voices series, while differing somewhat depending on grade level, contains books created by Latino authors and illustrators.
Maria Armstrong, executive director of the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents, says that book publisher Scholastic pitched her on the idea for Rising Voices and invited her to be a mentor for the project’s development. She was joined by fellow mentors Sulma Arzu-Brown, an Afro-Latina author, and Columbia-born actor John Leguizamo, who hosts in a Latino history docuseries on MSNBC.
Armstrong says she was excited about the idea of proactively promoting Latino representation through book offerings for teachers. Latino children, who make up roughly 28 percent of kids in public schools, too seldom get to see themselves and culture reflected in books made for their age groups, she adds.
“We want to share that we have Afro-Latinos, Japanese Latinos, it’s all over,” Armstrong adds. “People don’t realize it’s not just Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican Latinos. We’re a huge diverse community, and we wanted to show that across the collection.”
Latino representation in books for kids has ticked up recently. Between 2020 and 2022, there was a 51 percent increase in the number of children’s and young adult books from U.S. publishers created by Latino authors, illustrators and compilers, and a 17 percent increase in the number of children’s and young adult books published about Latino characters or culture, according to data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which studies a large sample of books published each year.
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