Interpreting Latino/a Literature as Critical Fictions

R eading Latino/a children’s literature has become a great passion and an important component of my work as an educator. The journey began while looking for children’s literary texts that somehow speak about aspects of my Puerto Rican/Latina identity and those communities close to mine. I was looking for personal and literary growth but also for ways in which I could share a different literary experience from the mainstream with children and teachers. Getting access to the literature was quite challeng­ ing, but once I developed some familiarity with awards such as the Américas Award, the Pura Belpré Award; publications such as Nieto (1997) and Barrera & Garza (1997) and several on-line resources, accessi­ bility became an easier process. As I continued reading more Latino/a literature and engaging in conversations around these texts with teachers and children, I realized that access to the literature was not the biggest challenge I would confront. Instead, what I found unsettling were my own interpretative lens, as well as those used by teachers and students to mediate our responses to the books. These lenses seem to be mostly centered in solely our personal responses to the literature without an in depth analysis of the authors’ stances and the social, political and cultural ideologies represented in the texts. Like hooks suggested in the opening quote, I felt that I did not fully understand or possess the language to “deconstruct [my/ours] conventional ways of knowing” in the interpretation of the literature. The type of responses to the texts seemed monologic in nature in that they focused only on the reader’s responses and excluded the examination of Latino/a literature as culturally situated and ideologically constructed. As a children’s and adolescent literature educator, I struggle with the same tensions raised by Cai (1997) and Rabinowitz & Smith (1998) in terms of my beliefs about Reader’s Response Theory and the ways in which authors’ stances could be explored. Beyond imposing a set of themes to a literary text, I am more interested in better contextualizing this literature in a way that becomes more meaningful and active for the readers especially from a sociopolitical perspective. As theories on critical literacy suggest (Comber & Simpson, 2001; Lewison, Flint & Van Sluys, 2002) it is important to challenge readers’ beliefs and disrupt commonplaces to look at the ideological aspects of texts and move authors out of neutral positions.