In 1995 the Texas State University College of Education honored distinguished alumnus Dr. Tomas Rivera, by developing the Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award. This award honors authors and illustrators who create literature that depicts the Mexican American experience. It helps keep alive Dr. Rivera’s legacy in literature and works towards sustaining the vision he saw for the education of Mexican Americans in the United States. In addition it raises conscious awareness among parents, teachers, and librarians of this distinguished literature so these books can inspire, entertain, and educate all children both at home and at school.

The 2008 winner of the award is Los Gatos Black on Halloween by Marisa Montes and illustrated by Yuyi Morales. Written for children in grades K -5, Montes weaves Spanish words into the rhyming text and tells the story of black cats, witches, skeletons and other spooky creatures that march to a haunted casa on Halloween night. Once there the creatures enjoy a fiesta with music and dancing until there is a “RAP! RAP! RAP!” at the door. This causes the frightened spooks to hide, for “The thing that monsters most abhor/Are human niños at the door! Of all the horrors they have seen/ The WORST are kids on Halloween!”

Marisa and Yuyi were kept busy last week with Tomas Rivera Book Award ceremonies and book signings! On Thursday, October 30th, they were honored at a special luncheon held at the university president’s home where they received their award prize and plaque. Later in the day, accompanied by a mariachi band, they attended the Author/Illustrator Presentation on campus.

The next day, as part of the Texas Book Festival Reading Rock Stars Program, the Tomás Rivera Committee selected a public school in Austin and bought every student a copy of Los Gatos Black on Halloween with the award seal on the cover. Yuyi and Marisa did a presentation at the school and the students were thrilled to get their books signed.

The whirlwind weekend of festivities continued on Nov 1st, when Montes and Morales participated in the Texas Book Festival by giving the Tomás Rivera Award reading session and then signing books for festival attendees.

PaperTigers will continue to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month until mid November.

As part of its celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sep 15–Oct 15), the University of Texas-Pan American Multicultural Center organized a contest in honor of the role Hispanic elders play in the fabric of family and community life. For a chance to win one of three scholarships, students of any nationality were encouraged to write about the influence of a Hispanic elder in their lives and the significance of their relationship.

The stories that best demonstrate intergenerational strength will be announced tonight, at a “Hispanic Heroes” ceremony in honor of the scholarship recipients and the relatives, teachers, mentors and community members who inspire them.

In many cultures throughout the world, including the Hispanic one, elders are indeed the most revered and respected people, and it’s always heartwarming to come across narratives that speak of their importance in young ones’ lives. In a recent interview for PaperTigers, writer Pam Muñoz Ryan spoke fondly of her grandmother’s influence:

“My grandmother, Esperanza Ortega Muñoz, was really the hub of the entire family. Everybody seemed to congregate at her house. As a young girl, I observed the influence that her affection had on people and how her traits carried over to others in the family. When I became an adult and a writer and looked back on her story, I realized how remarkable it was.”

Ryan’s words point to the fact that our elders are so often nurturers, role models, mentors. They are family and community historians that connect us to our roots by providing the necessary link between cultural heritage and present day customs.

For parents, teachers and caregivers looking to foster this special intergenerational connection, PaperTigers’ annotated reading list of grandparents/grandchildren books should prove helpful. We can’t think of a better way to end our Hispanic Heritage Month celebration than by encouraging children and adults to honor the Hispanic elders in their lives and communities—on heritage month and all year long!

If you’ve had a chance to savor Yum! Mmm! Que Rico! America’s Sproutings, or any of the books in this year’s Américas Award list of winners, honor books and commended titles, you will understand how spot-on this award’s committee is in recognizing and honoring accurate portrayals of our Americas’ rich cultural heritage.

As this year’s winners, Pat Mora and Rafael Lopez’s Yum! Mmm! Que Rico! and Laura Resau’s Red Glass will be honored tomorrow (Oct 4), at a ceremony at the Library of Congress, in Washington D.C. Hosted by the Library of Congress’s Hispanic Division and the Center for the Book, the event is free and open to the public, so don’t miss it if you are in the area!

Yuyi Morales’ Little Night, Jorge Argueta’s Alfredito Flies Home and Carmen T. Bernier’s Frida: Viva la Vida! are among the honored and commended titles selected by the award’s 2008 committee.

What better way to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month than by giving these books the recognition and readership they deserve?

During “Banned Books Week” in the US (Sep 28-Oct 4) people across the country celebrate their freedom to read. They display banned books and publicize the absurdity of allowing some to dictate what others are or aren’t allowed to read. Once you ban one book, banning season is open.

Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is an example of a book that was taken off the shelves for having “inappropriate language and sexual scenes. About a year ago it was banned from Johnston County’s libraries, in North Carolina, as a result of a formal complaint filed by the parents of a 15-year-old high school student. In García Girls, a semi-autobiographical novel for young adults, four sisters from a Dominican family recently arrived in New York face many challenges in adapting to American culture. The book is also the story of a family in search of freedom: they left their native Dominican Republic to escape a dictatorship.

The García Girls’ coming-of-age story was chosen by librarians as one of “21 classics for the 21st century.” It was also one of the four titles selected for “A Latino National Conversation,” a national project sponsored by the Great Books Foundation.

Alvarez, who received a Latina Leader Award in Literature in 2007 from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, remarked on the banning of her book: “This isn’t just an issue of my particular novel’s merit, but a bigger one about the curtailment of civil liberties.” Through her stories Julia Alvarez has quite masterfully created worlds that we all—but for a fearful few—cherish. In an essay titled “I, too, Sing América,” published before the ban on her book, she writes, “It was through the wide open doors of its literature that I truly entered this country, and that I began to dream that maybe I, too, could create worlds where no one would be barred.”

Check out The Kids’ Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the National Coalition Against Censorship which offers support, education, and advocacy to people facing book challenges or bans, and engages local activists in promoting the freedom to read. We must keep the doors of literature wide open, so that our children can enter whichever one is right for them.

The September Carnival of Children’s Literature went live yesterday, at Jenny’s Wonderland of Books. Amongst the great posts highlighted you will find Book Wink’s video book talk, shot in Ecuador, about the book Lost Treasure of the Inca, by Peter Lourie. Make sure to check it— and the rest of the posts— out. PaperTigers is in with two entries: Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month and The Tigers’ Bookshelf: Talking about The Happiness of Kati (and the talking has been great so far!).

Happy wanderings!

P.S: The next carnival will be at The Well-Read Child.

Poetry Friday is here to enchant our eyes and ears!… In anticipation of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sep 15 - Oct 15), I am currently re-reading The Tree is Older Than You Are, an incredible anthology of bilingual poems from Mexico, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. And I’d like to share one of its many gems with you all:

The Poet Pencil
by Jesús Carlos Soto Morfín, translated by Judith Infante

Once upon a time a pencil wanted to write
poetry but it didn’t have a point. One day a boy
put it into the sharpener, and in place of a point,
a river appeared.

Wild Rose Reader is brimming with poetic activity as host of this week’s Poetry Friday round-up. Check it out.

It’s time to hop over to the PaperTigers website to find out how we are celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Gary Soto, Amada Irma Perez, F. Isabel Campoy, Susan Guevara, Yuyi Morales, Robert Casilla… they are all there, gracing our pages and sharing their pride, wise words and inspiring images. Check out their great contributions, and please help us spread the word.