K-12

“THE UPSIDE DOWN BOY / EL NIÑO DE CABEZA”

Amazon Recommended Grade Level: Kindergarten - 3
Publisher: Children’s Book Press 
ISBN-13: 978-0892392179
Teacher’s Guide: https://www.leeandlow.com/uploads/loaded_document/420/The_Upside_Down_Boy_Teacher_s_Guide.pdf

“The Upside Down Boy” is Herrera’s memoir of the year his migrant family settled down so that he could go to school for the first time. The story’s main character, Juanito, is bewildered by his new school and misses the warmth of country life. Everything he does feels upside down. He eats lunch when it’s recess, and then he goes out to play when it’s lunchtime, and his tongue feels like a rock when he tries to speak English. But a sensitive teacher and loving family help him to find his voice and make a place for himself in this new world through poetry, art and music.

“FEATHERLESS/ DESPLUMADO”

Amazon Recommended Grade Level: 2 - 3
Publisher: Lee & Low Books 
ISBN-13: 978-0892393039
Teacher’s Guide: https://www.leeandlow.com/uploads/loaded_document/38/Featherless_TG_by_CBP.pdf

“Kids race across the grass, swooping like kites over an emerald sea. No one notices how fast I can spin my wheels. Will I ever catch up? Will they ever see me?” At his new school or on the soccer field, all everyone wants to know is why Tomasito’s in a wheelchair. His Papi gives Tomasisto a new pet to make him smile, but this bird is a bit different from the rest. Soon, this boy-bird team discovers there’s more than one way to fly—on or off the soccer field—and that those cheers Tomasito hears from the sidelines just might be for him. 

“GRANDMA AND ME AT THE FLEA / LOS MEROS MEROS REMATEROS”

Amazon Recommended Grade Level: 2 - 5
Publisher: Lee & Low Books 
ISBN-13: 978-0892392797
Teacher's Guide: https://www.leeandlow.com/images/pdfs/grandma_and_me_tg.pdf

Every Sunday, Juanito helps his grandmother at the remate (the flea market). There, Juanito and his friends romp from booth to booth, fulfilling Grandma’s vision of the remate as a sharing community of friendly give-and-take. Juanito gallops to the jewelry-man, who gives him a copper bracelet and a watch for Grandma in exchange for her help sending money orders home to Mexico. Señora Vela accepts a bundle of Grandma’s healing herbs in return for sacks of red chiles. With every exchange Juanito learns what it means to be a true rematero (fleamarketeer) and understands that the value of community can never be measured in dollars.

“CALLING THE DOVES / EL CANTO DE LAS PALOMAS”

Amazon Recommended Grade Level: 1 - 4
Publisher: Lee & Low Books 
ISBN-13: 978-0892391660
Author Study Toolkit: http://blog.leeandlow.com/2015/06/15/using-picture-books-to-teach-and-discuss-poet-laureate-juan-felipe-herrera-with-students/

“‘You were born on the road, like your father.’ My mother would tell me this when we had to move on to another labor camp.” “Calling the Doves” is Herrera’s story of his migrant farmworker childhood. In lyrical language, he recreates the joy of eating breakfast under the open sky, listening to Mexican songs in the little trailer house that his father built and celebrating with other families at a fiesta in the mountains. He remembers his mother’s songs and poetry, and his father’s stories and his calling the doves. For Juan Felipe, the farmworker road was also the beginning of his becoming a writer.
 

HIgher Education

“VOICES FROM MARIEL: ORAL HISTORIES OF THE 1980 CUBAN BOATLIFT”

by José Manuel García 
Publisher: University Press of Florida  
ISBN-13: 978-0813056661

Between April and September 1980, more than 125,000 Cuban refugees fled their homeland, seeking freedom from Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. They were abused by the masses who protested them before they were finally permitted to leave the country and departed in boats from the Port of Mariel. Told in the words of the immigrants themselves, “Voices from Mariel” offers an up-close view of this international crisis, the largest oversea mass migration in Latin American history. García, who emigrated on the Mariel boatlift as a teenager, describes the events that led to the exodus and explains why so many Cubans wanted to leave the island. 

“TOWARD A MULTICULTURAL CONFIGURATION OF SPAIN: LOCAL CITIES, GLOBAL SPACES”

Edited by Ana Corbalán and Ellen Mayock 
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 
ISBN-13: 978-1611476699

Comprised of twenty essays that examine literary, documentary and film representations of the multicultural configurations of Spain, all of the essays in this book treat multiculturalism in Spain, focusing on reconfigured Spanish cities and neighborhoods through Latin American, African and/or Eastern European migrations and cultures. Principal themes of the volume include urban space and access to resources, responses to the economic crisis, emerging family portraits, public versus private spaces, the local and the global, marginalities, migrations, and public expression of human and civil rights. This project examines the intercultural exchange that takes place in recent productions against an imaginary homogeneous Spanish national identity. 

“BEYOND BOLAÑO: THE GLOBAL LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL”

by Héctor Hoyos  
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0231168434

Through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet and Fernando Vallejo, among other leading authors, Hoyos defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized era. Calling attention to fresh innovations in form, voice, perspective and representation, he also affirms the lead role of Latin American authors in reshaping world literature. Focusing on post-1989 Latin American novels, Hoyos considers the narrative techniques and aesthetic choices Latin American authors make to assimilate the conflicting forces at work in our increasingly interconnected world.

“THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN LITERATURE”

Edited by Janet Perez and Wendell Aycock
Publisher: Texas Tech University 
ISBN-13: 978-0896721968

Few events have stirred the emotions and caught the imaginations of intellectuals as did the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. This book examines the diverse literatures that the war inspired: a literature relating directly to the war, a literature of exile arising from the forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco and a polemical literature embracing pro-Franco and Loyalist sympathies. Here, specialists from a variety of fields explore these literatures within comparative and interdisciplinary frameworks. They reflect upon film, poetry, novels, painting, discourse, biography and propaganda. The essays are grouped according to the original languages of the works they discuss: French, Russian, English and Spanish.