by Janine Schall, University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX
Los gatos black with eyes of green,
Cats slink and creep on Halloween.
With ojos keen that squint and gleam—
They yowl, they hiss…they sometimes scream.
From Los Gatos Black on Halloween
In last week’s post I shared responses from nine Latina teachers who explored several children’s books that use English/Spanish codeswitching. Most of these teachers grew up with Spanish as either their first language or a major additional language. In addition, they all live in South Texas, where well over half the population speaks Spanish at home and a sizeable portion of the community uses a mixture of English and Spanish (variously called Tex-Mex or Spanglish) in daily life. Codeswitching, for many of these teachers, is something that they hear and use every day. Codeswitching in literature, on the other hand, is not particularly common, though the amount of literature that uses codeswitching is growing. Why do some authors choose to use codeswitching in their writing?
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Today’s blog begins a discussion by authors Ruta Sepetys, Jim Deem, and Jewell Parker Rhodes at the 2012 Tucson Festival of Books in March entitled “Confronting Difficult Life Events through Story.” The discussion will continue in the next two blogs. All three authors have published books, both fiction and non-fiction, that deal with terrible historical events and the resiliency of people to endure in the most horrific of circumstances.
In 
In the theory of “suspension of disbelief” as suggested by British poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it is the storyteller or author who must spin such a compelling tale that the listener/reader will accept a fantasy as a plausible reality. In 
