by Holly Johnson, The University of Cincinnati

 

“Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.”

― Carlos Fuentes

To end this month’s blog on immigration, I thought I would discuss “the best of the rest,” those books I did not highlight in the last few weeks. There is also a nice article that might be of interest to you all entitled, “Building Teachers’ Understanding of Immigration through Writing and Children’s Literature” by Margaret Gregor and Connie Green. It came out in the 2011 Childhood Education International Focus Issue and the list of books on immigration would be so helpful to anyone wanting to create a text set. Books like Brooklyn Bridge (Hesse, 2008) and One Green Apple (Bunting, 2006) as well as In the Small, Small Night (Kurtz, 2005) and The Day of the Pelican (Paterson, 2009).

Getting to some other great books would include Kahf’s (2006) The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf or 90 Miles to Havana (Flores-Galbis, 2012) for adolescents, which invite readers to contemplate what it must be like to live between two cultures. Other books would include Sarn’s (2014) I Love, I Hate, I Miss My Sister, which is a tragic story, but could be nicely paired with The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf as both deal with bridging two worlds—the traditional and the current. The protagonists live in Western cities, but their religious and cultural customs do not seem to dovetail well with the cultural mores they are learning.

Books on immigration give us a look inside others who are not like us, but they also given us insight into who we are and what our heritage is. Very few of us can say we did not come from those who immigrated. It is our legacy as human beings and as particular geographical and cultural groups. Perhaps there will always be something controversial about immigration, as well, as that controversy about who can come and who cannot also seems part of our legacy. We are fortunate, however, to have books to help us explore the issue, to remind us of who we are—as individuals, as cultural beings, and as human beings. Somewhere in that continuum, I think we would have the capacity to expand our ideas of the other to make room for those who do, indeed, enrich our nation and help us fulfill our ideals.

Please visit wowlit.org to browse or search our growing database of books, to read one of our two on-line journals, or to learn more about our mission.

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• Themes: Holly Johnson
• Descriptors: Books & Resources, WOW Currents