“Bringing Two Worlds Together”: A Critical Content Analysis of Latinx Children’s and Young Adult Literature and the Author’s Perspectives

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 2:30 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Race Content Analysis in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Table 7)

Abstract

1. Purpose:
Over 30 years ago, Sims Bishop (1990) used metaphors of windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors to argue that children’s and young adult (YA) literature can offer readers opportunities to see their own and others’ experiences represented in text. Decades of research have underscored the significance of her argument, and highlighted the importance of racial, ethnic, and linguistic representation in texts (e.g., Fox & Short, 2003; Martin, 2008; Martínez-Roldán, 2013). At the same time, the fields of children’s and YA literature continue to be dominated by whiteness (Cooperative Children’s Book Center, 2022), limiting opportunities for young people of color to see themselves and their communities in text. In this session, we use Critical Race Content Analysis (Pérez-Huber et al., 2020) to explore two promising examples of Latinx literature, highlighting how they, among other things, “[Centralize] culturally authentic experiences of People of Color in texts/images” (p. 5).

2. Theoretical Framework:
Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit; Arreguín-Anderson & Kennedy, 2013; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001), a framework related to Critical Race Theory, addresses how mainstream practices in educational settings erase students’ native language practices. In addition, LatCrit examines the ways in which language practices and immigration status intersect with race and racism. Using LatCrit, we explore how authors of children’s and YA novels incorporate Spanish and Latinx culture through language, characters, and plot in their books.


3. Methods & Data Sources:
This analysis is part of a broader study of Spanish in children’s and YA novels. We conducted a content analysis of 12 novels, drawing on multiple cycles of qualitative coding (Saldaña, 2012) to explore sentence- and word-level uses of Spanish in primarily English texts. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with the authors of each of these novels, discussing how and why they used Spanish in their books. In line with our theoretical orientation, we drew on Critical Race Theory Content Analysis (Pérez-Huber et al., 2020) to explore language use and race in two specific texts by coding the interviews and the text themselves.

4. Findings:
Preliminary findings indicate that authors incorporated the life experiences of Latinx communities and their relationship to Spanish in authentic ways. For example, one author integrated culturally authentic experiences in their text through addressing stereotypes of Latinx characters and highlighting the experiences of mixed status Latinx families living in the United States. Additionally, we discuss how authors suggested that their uses of Spanish reflected their families’ own languaging practices, normalized Spanish as an American language, and promoted inclusivity. We also discuss the tensions they experienced in engaging in this work, including pressures experienced navigating the publishing industry.

5. Significance:
Our findings illustrate the complexities and importance of representing the experiences of Latinx communities and Spanish language authentically in novels for young people, while also offering unique insight into the writerly experiences of published authors. In particular, our findings interrogate hierarchies in language use across these texts, and seek to build towards more humanizing and authentic representations of the linguistic experiences in children’s and YA literature.

Authors

• Diego Xavier Roman, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Mia Hicks, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Angela Lake, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Emily Machado, University of Wisconsin - Madison