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A conversation with a high school teacher after a conference talk led the author to reconsider the question of what constitutes culture.
Years ago, I gave a talk at the NCTE Annual Convention on the subject of mestizaje, or language hybridity in Mexican American literature, and how teachers can best make use of it in their reading and writing classrooms to engage and encourage their linguistically diverse students. After my presentation, I stepped off the dais to mingle with members of the audience who lingered to ask questions or to share their own ideas on the subject of Mexican American young adult literature. These moments are rich because they are opportunities for presenters to receive organic feedback from audience members who are more likely to tender honest, sometimes brutal critique. More often than not, audience members provide surprising treasures during these exchanges.
This time I got a treasure-and-a-half. I was approached by a young woman who introduced herself as an ELA teacher in a North Carolina public school who worked directly with recent immigrant adolescents, most of whom were in the country illegally. She described them as "living in the shadows" of their city. She wanted to share an experience she had had with them using my first novel, The Jumping Tree, the story about Rey, a Mexican American boy growing up on the US-Mexico border, with direct ties to family in Mexico, and who faces challenges ranging from bullying to coming up with a definition of true manhood to experiencing the death of a loved one for the first time.
The teacher was working on her master's degree and had some knowledge of the use of culturally relevant literature to increase the chances at literacy success among minoritized students and, more specifically, those struggling to learn English. Her understanding of cultural relevance was akin to my own at the time: provide reluctant or struggling readers a book in which they see and hear themselves represented through the character's story, resulting in a likelihood of improved literacy skills and abilities, ideally leading eventually to authentic reading experiences. To me, this meant putting a book about a brown character in the hands of brown students uninterested in reading. The students would naturally identify with the...