children

What is culture? Marisol asked me that last week as we drove to preschool for the Cinco de Mayo celebration. It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. I found myself saying something like, “Culture is something a group of people share, usually from the same place, like a country, like food and music and, well, you know, like we speak Spanish.” I know — explanation fail. I’m still not sure how to answer her question. We share a culture, stemmingRead More ...

Ever since I met my husband, when he was an exchange student from Mexico at my U.S. university, he has been bragging about an amazing summer camp he went to as a child in Mexico D.F.: “There were sports and games, we would swim and have gymnastics every day, they taught us about leadership and did team-building activities.” He always said that one day, he would send his kids there. Fast-forward 13 years, when we had three kids ages 5,Read More ...

I’m tired…culturally exhausted. I could speak Spanish all day, no problema. But lately, it seems like that’s not enough for me to be accepted by Spanish speakers. I can’t change my deep-seated values or my general way of being, but I am feeling pressured to do so in order to just be part of my extended family. I’ve had some minor clashes with my mother-in-law and stepdaughters recently that are making me reevaluate how I’m really seen by the LatinoRead More ...

CNN’s Anderson Cooper is devoting this whole week to a special report called “Kids on Race: The Hidden Picture.” I don’t have cable, but I just watched the first segment, which aired last night, online and I must confess: I cried. I don’t know if you’ve watched it, but it was really difficult to watch a bunch of both white and black 6-year-olds — in other words, kids Vanessa’s age — talk about how the color of your skin mattersRead More ...

As I’ve mentioned several times before, my daughter has been learning how to read in English at school and coming home and transferring what she’s learning into Spanish. Although we have tons of books in Spanish at home, we don’t really have a lot of books for early readers. I’m not a huge fan of translations and so I’ve kind of stayed away from those, so I was curious to see what Scholastic Club Leo‘s Paquete Amigos Favoritos — a setRead More ...