Nishat Kurwa, Turnstyle News
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Writer Malin Alegria's first novel, "Estrella’s Quinceanera", covers familiar territory for anyone who’s ever been fifteen, and a girl, and battled with her mother. Still, the fact that the sassy protagonist is Mexican American makes her a novelty in young adult fiction.
The original idea for "Estrella’s Quinceanera" came from a publishing house. Alegria was commissioned to write a book that would reach Latino teens. The book centers on a quintessential coming-of-age experience for many Latinos; the traditional party that happens when a girl turns 15.
But some of the archetypes in the narrative dreamed up by Alegria’s non-Latino editors... sounded like they’d been dreamed up by non-Latino editors. For instance, they described a character who sounded Dominican, from the upper West Side in New York, but whose family owned a Mexican restaurant. Alegria said to a certain extent, she knew she had to work with the stereotypes the publisher presented to her. "There were some details that I accepted from them and others that I totally ignored. Because I thought that if I was going to write a quince story I was going to just write the craziest story I could think of, with the girl having to wear a secondhand dress, that was her cousin's that was made in Tijuana….her family was forcing her to do this, but she really didn’t want to."
For someone who was raised by radical Chicano parents in the 70s, Alegria is sanguine about the compromises she made in this “collaboration” with the publisher. She said she tried to be as subversive as possible, inserting references to Cesar Chavez and Aztec dance, while still making sure to write with mass audiences in mind. "I had this cholo cousin in El Centro," she said, "and he called me and said, 'Ay Malin, I saw your book at Walmart! You're right by the washing machines.' I’m like, 'Yes! Walmart!'"
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This commentary originally aired on WAMU, American University Radio in Washington, D.C.
By Maria Snellings
On a recent Saturday morning at Eastern Market, I ran into a classmate, who greeted me and then asked in a whisper, “What are you doing with all these white people?” I nearly laughed at her boldness. “They are my family,” I answered.
With pride, I added that my mom’s side was visiting from Texas and I was tasked with showing them around Washington. But, I get why our family reunion must have looked so strange to her. A group of white people with two token people of color?
My brother and I met when I was three. He and I aren’t related by blood but we come from the same orphanage in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Our mom says it took me a while to warm up to her. She thinks it’s because she was the fourth woman who was introduced to me as “Mom.”
My birth mother loved me but was too sick to take care of a child. So off I went to an aunt. But she was too poor to take care of me, so I was sent on to the orphanage. There, a woman I called “Mom”, looked after me until I was adopted by a loving woman I now call “Mom," a white American from Texas.
Trans-racial adoptions have caught more than just my classmate’s attention. In the 1980s, social worker Estela Andujo followed 60 Mexican-American orphans who had been adopted by either Mexican-American or Anglo families. She found that children raised by white families did not identify with the Mexican-American community but those raised by Latino families did.
More recently, an article in Latina Magazine presented the commonly held idea that adopting Latino children is “less traumatic for them when they can be matched with a Latino family.”
My experience, regardless of whether I was raised by a white, black or Latino family, was traumatic simply because I had been introduced to four different mothers. Being told someone is your mom when you think you already know who your mom is, is disconcerting, especially for a child. Every time I found comfort with each of my first three mothers, I was passed on.
It’s undeniable that being adopted and raised within another culture or race affects a child’s perception of herself and the way she connects with her heritage. But who’s to say the result is negative, especially when the outcome is love.
These commentaries by D.C. area teens are part of a collaboration between WAMU's Youth Voices program, Youth Radio and the Latin American Youth Center.
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(download mp3)Wonder what it’s like to feel like a stranger in your own backyard? Check out this video from Youth Radio DC at the Latin American Youth Center about navigating life in the U.S. when you don’t speak English.
A National Survey on Latino youth was released Friday by the Pew Hispanic Center. The study found that many Latinos have attitudes that contradict their behavior. For example, Latino youth care about education, hard work, career success, and are optimistic about their futures. However, they are also more likely to drop out of school, live in poverty, and become teen parents than other American youths. They also have high levels of exposure to gangs.
The survey was conducted on Aug 5 through Sept 16, 2009 and questioned 2,012 young people, ages 16-25. The study found that Latinos are not only the largest minority population in the U.S, but also the youngest. One-in-five school children in the U.S. are Latino and one-in-four newborns is Latino. These numbers alone, show that young Latinos will shape the kind of society American becomes in the 21st century.
The survey compared Latino youth of different backgrounds. It compared foreign born with native born, and first generation to later generations (second, third and higher).
98 percent of native-born Latino youth are twice as more proficient in English and 59 percent of them are enrolled in high school or college. Native born youth are also twice as likely as foreign born youth to have ties to a gang or to have gotten into a fight or carried a weapon in the past year.
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Now that 15.1% of the
Before the Latin fusion band, Yerba Buena, brought the funk, Representative Hilda Solis of California spoke some words of inspiration from the Presidential Stage. Solis was recently appointed by President-elect Obama to be Secretary of Labor (the first woman to hold this powerful position), and riled the crowd up with her Spanish rhyme, “! Se oye, se siente, las mujeres estan presente!”(“You hear it, you feel it, the women are here”). Read more...
Every year, thousands of places are filled with children who are looking for Santa to give him their letter. A letter saying that they behaved well during the year and they ask for toys in return.
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