I prepare the classroom with as many globes as I can get my hands on and a large wall map. One that shows biomes (e.g., rainforests, deserts, temperate areas) is more useful than a political map. I decorate the walls with colorful maps of Puerto Rico that can be purchased at Barnes and Noble and with the wonderful posters that the Puerto Rican Tourism Company will be glad to send posthaste (508) 759-1238. (The number in San Juan is 1-800-866-7827.)
I also set up an introductory library, to which I will add the books that we read together. Try to borrow books by Hispanic authors and bilingual books from a public library or your Media Center or from bilingual programs in your building. I include some current titles in the Student Bibliography below. These are not books that specifically develop the themes of this unit, but they introduce students to relevant vocabulary and culture.
There are a number of bilingual books that children always love to pore over. Spot’s Big Book of Words/El libro de las palabras de Spot is about as elementary and delightful a dual-language dictionary as one can imagine. Then there is Barron’s clear and colorful Bilingual First Books series that includes Animals/Los animales, Colors/Los colores, Numbers/Los numeros, Opposites/Los contrarios. Finally, my favorites: Albertina anda arriba, el abecedario/Albertina Goes Up, an Alphabet Book and Cincuenta en la cebra, contando con los animales/Fifty on the Zebra, Counting with the Animals, by Nancy Maria Grande Tabor, who grew up in Mexico and has taught in elementary schools there. All of these are inexpensive and readily available. To use them effectively, of course, someone in the classroom needs to be able to pronounce elementary Spanish.
Part One:
La isla
I start with Isla, a picture book with a substantial text by Arthur Dorros, since each of the three themes that I wish to present in this unit can be found within it: love of the diverse and lush tropical island of Puerto Rico; continuing ties with family and community, no matter where they are, and the need to move back and forth between the Caribbean and the Mainland; and, finally, the ways in which the life of Puerto Rico is carried on far away from the island, in a city like New York. As such, Isla can serve not only as an introduction but as a link from one section of this unit to another. After a shared reading of the book and an activity, students will make their first journal entry. Lesson One is described in more detail below under Lesson Plans. Its pattern of a reading followed by written reflection upon that reading will be the usual model for this Unit.
Having learned about
la isla
through a piece of fiction, students will next construct their own three-dimensional map of the island, labeling its six geographical zones and the bodies of water that surround it. As children scrunch up newspaper to form mountains and paste down felt or sandpaper to simulate various landscapes, geographical concepts and vocabulary will be much easier to remember. As part of Lesson Two, students can learn and write about all kinds of curious fauna and flora--both land and marine, indigenous and introduced. There are not only a number of excellent science books on the rainforest and its inhabitants but folktales with animals as heroes. Here is an opportunity to pinpoint those areas such as the rainforest, coastal dry forest, and coral reefs that are seriously endangered. Discussion and journal entries can probe the passionate nationalistic feelings behind the protests over the U.S. Naval Reservation on the island of Vieques.
This first part of the unit will conclude with traditional tales about country folk,
los
jibaros
, like Juan Bobo, and a Haitian story about the eagerness of children to get to their rural school, even though it means leaving at dawn in bare feet. I also recommend Under the Sunday Tree, with paintings by Mr. Amos Ferguson and poems by Eloise Greenfield. Set in the Bahamas, the poems “Tradition” and “Donkey,” especially, convey the sense of country life and the traditions behind it. This rural life is also fast disappearing, but its memory is especially precious to those who have experienced the world of gray concrete, locked doors, and the high prices of mainland cities like New York. There will be two writing assignments based on these texts: The first will be to turn one of the Juan Bobo stories into a play and the second will be to interview a family member who remembers Puerto Rico or “down South” or a very different way of life.
Part Two:
La comunidad
Saturday Sancocho, by Leyla Tores, introduces the second theme,
la comunidad
. Just as
la isla
has the particular and proud meaning of “the island that means home,” so
comunidad
suggests a whole network that includes the importance of the family and the interdependence of community life. In this picture book, a little girl watches as her grandmother, with nothing but a dozen eggs, bargains and trades in the market until she has everything she needs for their Saturday treatchicken stew
.
From a market square on a Saturday morning, we will move to the major community event of Carnival, the time of merrymaking just before Lent. Vejigante Masquerader, by Lulu Delacre, describes the way in which Ramon, a boy from a poor family, is able to have a full costume for the festival. The story is set in Ponce, where the celebration lasts for a solid month. Although we will not decorate cow bladders, making elaborate and terrifying masks will allow us to talk about the African influence that is especially strong in the city of Ponce and to write about the many reasons for wearing masks and costumes.
For comparison, we will also read Arthur Dorros’s Tonight is Carnival. Set in a farming village in the mountains of Peru, this book can be compared to what the students learned about life in the Puerto Rican countryside in Lesson One. Here it is not the African-inspired masks that characterize the abandon of Carnival but native instruments. Through the contrast, students will see the extent to which all native peoples combine their own deeply loved customs with the Christianity of the Spaniards who arrived only slightly over 500 years ago.
Our third book that contains information about Carnival is also our first piece of young adult fiction. Carmen T. Bernier-Grand’s In the Shade of the Nispero Tree describes how growing up can come about through experiencing racial and class prejudice. Here we see that
la comunidad
is not just a happy market square or neighborhood in which somehow everything turns out for the best and people are willing to trade and even give more than was asked for. In this more complex story, Teresa loses her best friend, who is black, when her parents scrimp and save to send her to a private school where only the whiter girls are accepted. Things become even more painful when her working-class parents are rejected for membership in the club to which the families of all the other students belong. The basic themes of this book are too complex to introduce to second and third graders without a great deal of preparation that is beyond the scope of this unit, but they provide excellent background for the teacher. Moreover, the book is useful since it describes the way in which girls of various classes celebrate Carnival.
Part Three:
La diaspora
A diaspora is the often wide-spread scattering of a people through war, economic conditions, or persecution. The result is the terrible pain and confusion of exile or wandering. Sometimes the exiles return. Finding that things are not as they were, they may wander again, feeling that they have two homesor none. The term was once used primarily for Jews; it has come to be understood as highly appropriate for African and Hispanic peoples and could be used as well for others, such as the Irish who were forced from their homeland because of the potato famine.
This theme may seem too sophisticated for young students, and yet many childrenno matter what their class, color, or economic circumstances--have to learn about how difficult it is to move, to leave friends, familiar surroundings and ways of doing things. The fundamental powerlessness of children helps them empathize with the inability of others to make the choices they most wish for. Even a preliminary understanding of what is involved may help them understand that diversity can be felt both as a sadness and as a source of pride.
Most of the children’s books about the Hispanic experience focus on the positive aspects of what people have created for themselves. For example, there is The Bossy Gallito, retold by Lucia M. Gonzalez and illustrated by Lulu Delacre who wrote and illustrate Vejigante Masquerader. Students may predict that this story about the cockfighting rooster is set in one of the towns of the Caribbean that they have been studying. But in fact the setting is Little Havana, the center of the Cuban community in Miami. The book is a perfect illustration of how people from other places can transport their way of life or culture when they must leave the place where they were born. The text of the book is also a fine example of comparative literature since it follows the pattern of the English poem “The Old Lady and Her Pig.”
We will then move to books set in New York, the place to which so many Puerto Ricans immigrated. First we will read Abuela, the same grandma who took her granddaughter to Puerto Rico at the beginning of this unit. In this book, Abuela takes Rosalba on a tour of New York City. They go to the park and the docks where all the delicious fruit from Puerto Rico is unloaded and to the Statue of Liberty that had welcomed Abuela when she first arrived in New York. They also go to the little store owned by Rosalba’s aunt and uncle, the kind that in this country is called a
bodega
. As in Isla, this sunny, upbeat story is filled in the most natural places with Spanish words and phrases that are deftly translated within the text. Clearly Abuela feels at home and has brought some of her first home with her.
Equally happy is Leyla Torres’ Subway Sparrow. Born in Bogota, Columbia, Torres has a strong sense of the way in which cultures can mix and mingle. Subway Sparrow combines three different languages as a little girl, an Hispanic man, and a Polish woman work together, despite their different languages, to rescue a bird trapped in a train. The Spanish version of the book can be useful since there the girl’s words are in Spanish and the man’s words are in English!
Three final books are worth including, even if they are not about Puerto Rico, because of the way they celebrate bridging cultures. In Torres Liliana’s Grandmothers, a little girl spends vacations with one grandma in New England and with one in South America. Although each visit looks very different, there are similarities because of the nurturing and sharing. Students can write about the time they spend with various relatives. Another text that shows an older relative sharing her culture is A Birthday Basket for Tia by the poet Pat Mora, who stresses the way in which Mexican and American cultures can blend. The book may seem slight but it uses language in a cumulative way that children love
But in Going Home, written by Eve Bunting and illustrated by David Diaz, a different range of feelings is explored. Bunting and Diaz have found a way to do this sensitively and appropriately. The story is that of a family going back across the Border to celebrate Christmas in the village from which the parents originally came. This is the only children’s book I have found that suggests that the rural Mexican home is safe in a way that the American home is not and that the sacrifice that has been made in emigrating is because of opportunities for the children. In a gentle yet serious way, the children come to understand just how much their parents have sacrificed when they see them, looking relaxed and young, dancing cheek to cheek in the Christmas moonlight.
In Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda, we have a text that is parallel to In the Shade of the Nispero Tree but that is much harsher. Here we see what it is like to be between two worlds. Born in New York City, Nilda has none of the memories of Rosalba’s Abuela. But despite the fact that her English is good, she is not treated like an American by her teachers at school or by the social workers upon whom survival depends. Over and over again in the novel, she expresses her confusion, her loneliness, and her anger in passages that draw the reader in through their specificity and their sensory language. Images from her paragraphs can help students visualize and explore her scenes.
