“Feels like home to me”: Bilingual Authors’ Uses of Spanish in Children’s and YA Novels

• In Event: Cultural Affirmations as Remedy Within Latinx Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Purpose: Authors of Latinx children’s and young adult literature often bring Spanish words and phrases into primarily English books. Scholars have long analyzed the use of Spanish in these texts and offered important critiques of their sometimes limited and/or surface-level integrations of Spanish (Barrera & Quiroa, 2003; Kelly, 2019), often arguing that they center a white and English-monolingual audience of readers. However, scholars have rarely had opportunities to speak directly with authors about their writerly choices, including their own linguistic practices and the ways they imagine their potential audiences. In this study, we interviewed 12 children’s and young adult novelists who used Spanish in their published work. We asked: (1) How do authors of Latinx children’s and young adult literature conceptualize and discuss their own relationships with Spanish? (2) How do authors’ relationships with Spanish inform the way they imagine their audiences?
Theoretical Framework: We framed this study with translingual writing (Canagarajah, 2013; Horner et al., 2011), a theoretical perspective that encompasses “translanguaging, translating, and dwelling in borders” (Cushman, 2016, p. 235). In this study, translingual writing drew our attention to the ways writing is entangled with writers’ identities and familial histories (Alvarez et al., 2017), language ideologies (Sun & Lan, 2022), and understandings of audience (Durán, 2017).
Methods and Data Sources: This analysis is part of a broader, multi-phase study of Spanish in children’s and YA novels. Phases included: (1) conducting an open-ended survey with 21 published authors who integrated Spanish into their novels; (2) conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 authors who completed the survey; and (3) conducting a content analysis (Hoffman et al., 2011) of 15 novels written by the authors who participated in interviews. We analyzed the data corpus via cycles of qualitative coding (Saldaña, 2013), and then connected our coding scheme to literature and theory to construct themes (Ravitch & Riggan, 2016).
Findings: Across our data, authors articulated complex relationships with their languages in ways that were intertwined with language ideologies, family histories, and identity. For instance, one author described Spanish as feeling “...like home to me.” At the same time, many authors addressed language loss, with this same author expressing regret about her primary use of English as an adult. Many of these authors considered their own relationships to Spanish as they imagined how readers would take up their work. Nearly all imagined Latinx children reading their books. While they hoped that these children would see themselves and their communities through the Spanish used in the books, others also expressed empathy for readers who might not understand those terms. For instance, one author described how she liked to “treat my readers with love,” explaining key Spanish terms via context clues and translations.
Significance: This study offers unique insight into the lived and writerly experiences of published bilingual authors. It builds upon extant research that makes inferences about writers’ imagined audiences, with a discussion of the ways identity and ideology shape writers’ decision-making.

Authors

• Emily Machado, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Diego Xavier Roman, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Angela Lake, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Mia Hicks, University of Wisconsin - Madison