CELEBRATING CUENTOS (2011) EDITED BY JAMIE CAMPBELL NAIDOO

Celebrating Cuentos: Promoting Latino Children’s Literature and Literacy in Classrooms and Libraries. Jamie Campbell Naidoo, editor. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2011. 381 pp. $55.00 ISBN 13: 978-1-59158-904-4

by Yago S. Cura
yagoscura@gmail.com

I like to think the results of the 2010 Census caught everyone by surprise except Latinos. Latinos have been following the writing on the wall since the 2000 Census, and its fortuitous projections. Latinos still lag in terms of educational attainment, broadly, and high school graduation rates, specifically. Moreover, even though “22 percent of all children under the age of eighteen identified as Latino,” (2010 Census) Latinos were severely absent from the children’s literature available to students. Naidoo’s book cites a study conducted by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center which shows that of the roughly “5,000 books published in the United States in 2008…roughly 48 were created specifically by Latino authors/illustrators.” Therefore, Naidoo’s book is a phenomenal resource for Latino grammar school teachers, as well as professors of Education, priming the new crop of educators that are going to tackle these disparities in achievement. The first section provides stellar reference on the history of Latino education via landmark cases; the second section of the book presents a doubletake on the development of Latino children’s literature in the United States. And, the third section delineate resources for augmenting collections and planning for seminal Literacy events like Día.