This unit has two goals. The first is to acquaint students, including those of Puerto Rican descent, with three of the dominant aspects of Puerto Rican culture today: love of the island of
la isla
to which Puerto Ricans refer over and over again; strong ties with family and community; and accommodations to the diaspora, the dispersal of Puerto Ricans to the United States mainland, escalating in the 1950s, as Puerto Ricans attempted to escape overpopulation and poverty at home.
The second goal is to use the information, excitement, and questions generated by this unit to provide daily writing topics. As students work on them, and particularly on description and exploration of feelings, they will better understand what their teachers mean by “elaboration.” My hope is that, through this daily reading and writing, students will begin to compare and contrast aspects of their own lives to those of the characters about whom they are reading. They can stretch their imaginations, not only for their own lives but for the lives of others, and, in this way, they may begin to appreciate commonality and difference.
But the students will not only read, listen, converse, and write. They will edit, peer-edit, publish and share what they have written. They will tape works in progress so that their own words become part of their experience of oral language. The unit will culminate with a Travelers’ Tea, to which families will be invited, so that students can have the experience of presenting finished work.
In this unit, I hope students will pique their curiosity (through what is sometimes a very unwilling suspension of disbelief), enrich their frame of reference, build vocabulary and syntactical expertise. They will thus strengthen their own voices and their sense of self.
Our written sources will be picture books and then young adult fiction, written for the most part by Hispanic authors, a number of whom are Puerto Rican. Some of the texts have been published both in English and in Spanish editions; some are printed in a bilingual format. I intend to make students aware of the Spanish, even I they cannot read it. (In fact, they will notice it and try to read it on their own.) I want them to understand that Puerto Ricans often speak both languages. If they grew up on the Island, they probably learned Spanish first; if they grew up in the Continental United States, they probably spoke some English, at least in school. Puerto Ricans often create their own dialect, Spanlish, which is a mixture of both.
There will be some hands-on activities as well, notably the construction of a topographical map of Puerto Rico; mask-making for the dramatic recreation of the popular folktale, Juan Bobo, and for a fuller understanding of the vejigante masqueraders, andof coursesome opportunities for food as students explore the mercados or marquetas that lie at the heart of community life.
In choosing the three aspects of Puerto Rican culture listed in my opening paragraph, I am not trying to oversimplify or minimize questions of identity or politics that have been for some decades of vital concern to Puerto Ricans and to some non-Puerto Rican Americans as well. Puerto Ricans have been caught for generations between the two worlds of the Caribbean and the mainland United States and between issues of independence vs. statehood. The books cited in the Teacher’s Bibliography by Harry Pariser and Jose Luis Gonzalez give a full and sobering picture.
But this unit is for young children. It is intended to lay a foundation of sufficient information and respect so they they will later be able to move to a fuller understanding. It is for this reason that I have not used Jane Yolen’s superb picture book Encounter as an introductory text for a study of slavery, oppression, and national cultural identity as I would for older students. Yolen’s story of a Taino Indian boy who first dreams of great white birds and then identifies the Spanish sailing ships as agents of destruction balances traditional presentations of Columbus Day and extends discussions of slavery.
This unit, designed for third graders, can be scaled up or down for second or fourth or even fifth. It is appropriate for Hispanic Awareness month in the fall. For second graders, I would use it during the second half of the year, once literacy-enhancing techniques and student-teacher bonding is well established. I would describe the unit and forthcoming Tea to parents during fall or mid-winter conferences.
This unit emerged from Professor Sandra H. Ferdman-Comas’ course on Women Writers in Latin America and from the home-truth that there are many women writersJudithe Shakespeares to use Virginia Woolf’s comparisonwho, for various reasons, have turned to short forms such as poems or novella or children’s literature or young people’s fiction. One such is Carmen T. Bernier-Grand. Her novel In the Shade of the Nispero Tree describes the maturing of Tere, a young girl whose mother thinks that she can make it into
la sociedad
or high (white) society in Ponce.
The outstanding author Nicholasa Mohr is another example. Writing in English, her first language, she records and dramatizes in a number of novels her own struggles to understand who she is in a New York City that is hostile to the customs and the poverty of her newly-arrived family. Interestingly, Mohr has been greatly praised within the Hispanic literary community but is not generally known or studied beyond it. Most third graders will find Mohr and Bernier-Grand too difficult to read in their entirety, but many passages from their books are so evocative that they can serve as points of departureas promptsfor student writing.
I was pleased to find two such excellent Puerto Rican writers for this unit, one born in Puerto Rico and one born in the barrio, the ghetto neighborhood of New York City. Although I use Hispanic writers from other countries for some of the lessons below, I do so only when they draw upon common cultural traits or customs or when a contrast is useful. Elementary as it may sound, it is crucial that studentsand teachersunderstand that Hispanic cultures, inside as well as outside of the United States, are distinct and wish to be understood as distinct for any number of historical reasons.
