Vanessa Pérez-Rosario Presents: Translanguaging in Latinx Literature

While today there are many wonderful works of literature that reflect the Latino/a experience and are appropriate for very young children through high school, these books often don’t make it into our curricula or our classrooms. This project will offer teachers culturally sustaining literature suggestions, deepen our understanding of bilingualism and the language practices of Latinx bilinguals, which is enriching and empowering for the bilingual reader. The project is aligned with our core principals of developing a multilingual ecology in schools and to seeing bilingualism as a resource. Analyzing the way that authors translanguage, or flexibly use Spanish and English in their texts, helps us to explore our bilingualism and bicultural identities leading to a deeper understanding of bilingualism. Latin literature encourages literacy development through the use of culturally relevant texts and it deepens our understanding of bilingualism and the language practices of Latino/as.

Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is managing editor of Small Axe, associate professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and a translator. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (Illinois 2014) and the editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010). Vanessa recently completed a translation manuscript of Mayra Santos-Febres’s collection of poetry Boat People and has edited and translated a manuscript titled I am My Own Path: A Bilingual Anthology of the Collected Writings of Julia de Burgos. Vanessa is on the Advisory Board of the CUNY – New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB).