ABSTRACT
In her work “‘Speaking in Tongues’: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” Gloria Anzaldúa urged women of color not to “let the censor snuff out the spark, nor the gags muffle your voice” (Anzaldúa 1983: 173). Anzaldúa’s plea gestured ahead towards the suppressive climate faced by writers and readers of all colors, especially since the 1988 landmark censorship case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier. Her words thus serve as an appropriate starting point for an examination of censorship attempts directed towards books written by Latinos/as and those that the American Library Association considers to revolve around “Latino issues,” namely Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Luis Rodríguez’s Always Running, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Alex Sánchez’s Rainbow Boys, and Alta Schreier’s Vamos a Cuba (Figueroa 2011). This chapter focuses on book censorship in public grade schools because public grade schools are the places most affected by banning attempts, and it asks what is at stake in the attempts to remove Latino/a books from schools.
