Waking Up From the American Dream: Disturbing Class in Children's Literature

• In Event: Alternative Readings and Readers: Literature as Critical Identity Work

Abstract

Even though socioeconomic inequalities persist in the United States, the scholarship of children’s literature lacks class analysis, keeping the prevailing American Dream ideology intact. In this paper, a critical multicultural analysis of Mexican American migrant farmworkers in children’s literature, a cultural experience largely shaped by the power relations of class alongside race and gender, disturbs this silence. While these stories bring readers up close to the poverty that families endure, they portray these circumstances as personal and cultural. Critical multicultural analysis offers tools to read how class is rendered through words and images and moves away from a top-down systemic conceptualization of class to this power relation as social processes between people at home, school, work, and within communities.

Author

• Maria Jose Botelho, University of Massachusetts - Amherst