Children’s Literature

If one had any doubts about the centrality of “the child” to the current political economy, then the circulation of the term “anchor baby” and the fiery accusations about the validity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate should dispel such thoughts completely. Used by anti-immigration activists to describe the children of laborers born to a parent who does not hold US citizenship, and meant to be derogatory, “anchor baby” misleadingly suggests that a parent can easily obtain US citizenship if his or her child has been born in the United States. Of course, it comes as no surprise that the paranoia about just where Barack Obama was actually born – and thus whether he was entitled to be elected President of the United States – accompanied the very round of anti-immigrant fervor that birthed “anchor baby.” The debate flamed clearly racialized anxieties about how to prevent a man who traces his ancestry to Kenya and Kansas from being elected (or re-elected) President. By focusing on the location of his birth, opponents of Obama elliptically avoided discussing “race” while making a claim about his illegitimacy in a deeply racializing manner. The convergence of these two issues underscores the significance of “the child”

and leaves no doubt that how “the child” is conceptualized remains important to the theater of national power struggles and to the formation of boundaries of belonging. Put differently, the work of “the child” is more protean than we often assume. Caroline Levander makes this point exceptionally clear: “To the extent that the child represents the liberal-democratic state, it takes on and perpetuates the racial meanings inhering in that social entity. Analysis of the child therefore does not simply index who suffers from racism (and is therefore equated with a child) but, more fundamentally, reveals racial domination to be a system – like patriarchy – that underpins and enables liberal-democratic societies” (Levander 2006: 14). Freighted with what Levander describes as “signifying responsibilities,” how have Latino/a writers imagined the child as a vehicle to reimagine the social? More specifically, how have Latino/a writers utilized literature for children as part of this effort to envision a different world? What are the effects of conceptualizing Latino/a children as both audience and subject of literary production? What does that mean sonically and visually as well as to the overall repertoire of texts available for thinking about and teaching children? José Martí seized on these questions in 1889 when he wrote and published La edad

de oro, a four-issue magazine for children. While Martí was certainly not the first to

write for children in Spanish during the nineteenth century, La edad de oro stands out as the sole nineteenth-century Spanish language periodical published in the US for children (Martín-Rodríguez 2006: 17). Didactic, humorous, appealing, and irritating in their gendered, essentializing accounting of difference, the stories, poems, and essays published in La edad seek to formulate a child who engages modernity on modernity’s terms; this vision also instantiates a heterosexual family structure as the utopian ideal for the nation. These stories and poems clearly reflect the extent to which Martí abjures the structures of coloniality underpinning racializing narratives (although, as is clear, he does not question patriarchal accounts); this aporia in his understanding of coloniality might also be said to trouble contemporary narratives for Latino/a children, which often do not look surprisingly different from Martí’s foray into the genre. That is to say, they uphold a hetero-familial accounting of Latino otherness as spiritually superior and, where possible, resistant to the ills of capitalist industrialism. He also offers accounts of historical figures as role models, considers the centrality of “Indian-ness” to Latino self-understanding, and celebrates the playful reaches of the Spanish language. Martí of course is never uncomplex as “La muñeca negra” and “Los zapaticos de rosa,” two of the most famous pieces from La edad, make clear. In both the story and poem, Martí offers children a model of other children who reject racialist assumptions, show compassionate generosity when faced with poverty, and eschew baubles of bourgeois consumerism. And indeed, in constructing a social vision of interdependence he argues, throughout the collection, that an aggressive individualism ultimately renders everyone more vulnerable. As significant as Martí’s contribution has been to Latin American/Latino/a letters,

it remains invisible within the broader scholarship on children’s literature. So too does the work of María Cristina Mena and Pura Belpré. Anticipating both the archival devotion of Pura Belpré, and circling the problematics of industrialization that Martí decried, Mena’s themes similarly dovetail with many found in contemporary Latino children’s texts. Mena, however, turned fiction she had originally written for adults into stories for children, ultimately publishing these revisions as The Water-Carrier’s Secrets (1942), The Two Eagles (1943), The Bullfighter’s Son (1944), The Three Kings (1946), and Boy Heroes of Chapultepec: A Story of the Mexican War (1953). Belinda Rincón argues that Mena understood that her children’s fiction had to contend with young adult literature that “reproduced the tropes of empire to foster US imperialism by promoting its values” (Rincón 2009: 110). In The WaterCarrier’s Secrets, Rincón suggests, Mena offers a critique of these values and tries to inoculate her readers against militarism while developing a “subtle dialogue with Mexican nationalism” (2009: 112) in an effort to portray a Mexico that does not “need US economic and military intervention” (2009: 116). Dora Alicia RamírezDhoore reads The Two Eagles as a satire in which Mena shows the power struggles between a Mexican state governor and a US corporate titan (Ramírez-Dhoore 2003: 47-100). She argues that these struggles, while supposedly humorous, also showcase Mena’s ongoing critique of industrialization and assimilation and the abuses entailed in the Good Neighbor Policy. Additionally the story, in an obverse manner, critiques the politics of tourism and the racialized shaping of desirability, even as it underscores the crippling effects of consumerism.