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This year, Hispanic Heritage Month took me by surprise – I was still in back-to-school mode when I realized it was already the 15th of September! As I thought about what I wanted to do on Colorín Colorado in honor of Hispanic Heritage, I thought about all of the wonderful bilingual books that have been published over the past few years and all of the titles we had not yet added to the website. I decided that I would update our Hispanic Heritage booklists in a big way this year – not just adding a few favorites, but adding a lot of favorites! So I started combing through catalogs, recommended reading lists, and the shelves of our public library to see what we were missing. (The librarians in Arlington County, VA were very patient with me as I checked out and returned stacks upon stacks of books at a time.)
The result is a whopping 25 – yes, 25! – new and updated booklists organized by topic. My hope is that the thematic organization will make it easier to use these books all year long, not just during the months of September and October.
I did a lot of reading for this project and enjoyed it thoroughly – there were so many gems along the way. One book, however, stands out, and that is a book published more than ten years ago, Grandma’s Records by Eric Velasquez (author and illustrator of the Pura Belpré award-winning sequel, Grandma’s Gift).
The story of a young boy visiting his grandmother in Spanish Harlem and listening with her to her old records, which bring back memories of the life she left behind in Puerto Rico, is quiet, yet profoundly stirring. Grandma plays the records in the apartment, dancing in the living room with her grandson and teaching him all about the music that fills her heart with love and longing. There is one song, however, that transports and transforms her; when the two of them see the song performed live at a concert in the city, the impact of the moment is breathtaking. It must have been for young Eric too, inspiring him to write about it all of these years later.
That, to me, is what celebrating your heritage is all about – remembering the moments and people who defined you, who helped you understand who you are, who instilled something important in you…even if you didn’t realize it at the time. That is the singular opportunity we have when we find a book like Grandma’s Records and read it with a young child. What a gift our authors and illlustrators give us when they share those moments with us in a beautiful book, inspiring a new generation of children to do the same.
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