Monthly Archives: October 2009

Photo by Gaetan Lee Back in March, we published a series of entries related to the complex subject of bilingual education. Ana Lilian and I spent a bunch of time researching this topic: interviewing some of those involved in this area of education–including parents and teachers–and even visiting a few schools which offer this option to their communities. Since they were pretty popular with our readers, this week we’ve decided to re-post them in case you might have missed themRead More ...

I‘ve been racking my brain the last few days trying to come up with a definition of what’s a Latino. And, for the life of me, I still don’t have an answer. I mean, I guess I could look it up in the dictionary, but the word evokes so many different attributes that the truth is there just can not be a sole interpretation. Plus, I’ve found that it really depends on who you ask. Although it’s no longer newsRead More ...

Have you ever heard of a blogging carnival? I hadn’t until we were recently invited to participate in one. A carnival is basically a blog event dedicated to a specific subject and including several links to other blog posts dealing with said subject. This carnival’s topic? You guessed it: raising bilingual children. So, how does it work? In this particular case, Eve, over at Blogging on Bilingualism, is the host of October’s carnival. So, last week she wrote this postRead More ...

It’s been nine years since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (or Blanca Nieves y los Siete Enanitos, as I called it as a child) has been available in any form to view.  This is one movie I know I want mi niña to fall in love with as much as I did. Well, today is the day the classic movie that crossed borders to form a part of all our lives, and who’s claim to fame is having beenRead More ...

One of the things that I love the most about the fact that mi mamá lives so close to us–besides the obvious–is that she’s always teaching my daughter, Vanessa, songs and stories from my childhood that I don’t even remember. These help her enrich her vocabulary without making it a task, but it also reinforces our cultural heritage, an area in which I feel like I always need help. When she was a baby, it was my mom who startedRead More ...

When I meet new people, I often try to slip into the conversation that I’m Mexican-American. You can’t tell by looking at me (I’m the whitey-whitest in a family of fairly white Mexicans) and you can’t tell by talking with me because my Spanish is terrible. I love my culture and I’m so proud to be Latina, but I often feel like a fraud because I can’t really speak the language. The fact that I’m not bilingual is one ofRead More ...