Latina Moms | Daughters
How many mothers are weeping in Alabama? That’s what I keep asking myself as I scan the headlines and news stories coming out of the state now known as home to the harshest immigration law in the country. That’s what I keep wondering as I read descriptions of children vanishing from Alabama schools, of tearful [...]
Finally, some good news about Latino education. According to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center, college enrollment among Latinos between the ages of 18 and 24 rose sharply in the last year, jumping by 24% from 2009 to 2010. Young Latinos are now the second largest ethnic or racial group on campuses, surpassing the [...]
How do you change the world if you’re still struggling to love yourself? How do you love yourself when you’re a young gay woman raised in a conservative Catholic family that believes homosexuality is wrong? For decades, Catherine Pino, one of Washington D.C.’s most influential Latino lobbyists and advocates, wrestled with those questions, building a [...]
It was a four-letter word I had never before heard. But when the kids from down the street hurled it at me with all the fury and filth of a spitball, I immediately knew it was bad. Even in elementary school, I could sense all the ugliness and hate and hostility the epithet contained.. Spic! [...]
They are feministas and fashionistas, multicultural mamis and political pundits, cake-decorators and coupon-clippers. They are the rising ranks of Latina bloggers. And their voices are changing the digital landscape, offering an inside view of the power and the diversity of the Latina community. “We have such vastly different experiences. That’s not something everyone understands,” says Angelica [...]
The Weekly Reader book sits tattered and dog-eared on my library shelves. The front cover is long gone, the weathered pages embellished by a child’s Magic Marker scrawl. The pedestrian prose, meant for a first-grader’s eyes, seems to cower next to the literary grandeur of the other volumes in my collection. But in my heart, [...]
In one Texas school district, school cafeterias now offer hummus and vegetable platters, whole wheat pasta, and zucchini wraps. In another, lunch menus categorize dishes as “Go,” “Slow,” and “Whoa!” and use pictures to help non-English speaking students make healthy choices.Across the country, schools are exchanging prepared foods for freshly-grown produce, incorporating healthy eating lessons [...]
Community colleges—affordable, flexible, conveniently located—are the schools of choice for half of all Latino students enrolled in higher education. In 2008, more than 1 million Latinos were attending two-year colleges, an increase of 85% in eight years, according to the U.S. Census. “Most Latino college students are still first generation college students. They are navigating the [...]
From coast to coast, Latino youth have taken to the streets to rally for the passage of The DREAM Act. They’ve stirred public support, garnered media attention, and brought the issue to the forefront of political debates. A few years back, hundreds of Latino schoolchildren—alerted through social media, MySpace, and Internet discussions—left their classrooms in [...]
My tenth-grade students sat in the darkness, their eyes fixed on the grainy black and white photograph magnified on a screen in front of the classroom.They considered the four figures frozen in time: a man with an insouciant grin, a woman with a pearly smile, a curly-haired girl wiping her nose, another staring defiantly into [...]
