CABE Riverside Chapter #6

"The life of an undocumented child brings special challenges not found in books on their library shelves: feelings of isolation from neighbors, the burden of secrecy, and constant fear of deportation," writes librarian and author Natalie Dias Lorenzi for PragmaticMom.

"As a librarian, these books are difficult to match with the kids who need them, because a child obviously isn’t going to come up to me and say, 'I’m in this country illegally. Do you have any books with characters like me?'

I’d love to add more titles to this list, so if you have other recommendations for books with characters who are undocumented, I’d love to hear about them!"

"The life of an undocumented child brings special challenges not found in books on their library shelves: feelings of isolation from neighbors, the burden of secrecy, and constant fear of deportation," writes librarian and author Natalie Dias Lorenzi for The Pragmatic Mom.

"As a librarian, these books are difficult to match with the kids who need them, because a child obviously isn’t going to come up to me and say, 'I’m in this country illegally. Do you have any books with characters like me?'

I’d love to add more titles to this list, so if you have other recommendations for books with characters who are undocumented, I’d love to hear about them!"

🕊️Losing your family’s language can feel like an inevitable side effect of immigration, Kat Chow writes for The Atlantic, but it’s one she wants to prevent.

Chow’s parents migrated to the United States from China in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her parents spoke Cantonese and Taishanese but were also fluent in English. When Chow’s older sister Steph was in kindergarten, she requested that their parents speak only in English, and her parents acquiesced. Over time, Chow's ability to speak Cantonese faded.

Chow’s parents migrated to the United States from China in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her parents spoke Cantonese and Taishanese but were also fluent in English. When Chow’s older sister Steph was in kindergarten, she requested that their parents speak only in English, and her parents acquiesced.

What Chow and her sisters experienced is called language attrition: the forgetting of a language by a once-proficient speaker and a family’s subsequent intergenerational dilution of the skill. Reversing language attrition is “really about ‘time’ with that language—and ‘high-quality’ time,” Krista Byers-Heinlein, a psychology professor who studies infant development and language acquisition, told Chow. Byers-Heinlein estimates that children need between 20 to 25 percent of their waking time with high-quality interactions in order to learn a language.

“The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort,” Chow continues. Betty Choi taught her kids their heritage languages, Chinese and Korean, as she was learning them herself. She cycled through different methods: enrolling herself in language classes; seeking out multilingual child-care providers; and exposing her children to books, songs, and videos in those languages, before she ended up creating her own curriculum.

Another parent Chow spoke with, Hieu Truong, is slowly introducing her son to Vietnamese while being realistic about the ease of bilingualism: “I want him, when he talks to his older relatives, to know how to properly greet them—know how to say ‘Thank you.’”

“This is what I want for any potential children of mine, too,” Chow continues. “I don’t desire fluency for them merely to compensate for what I lost as a kid. Rather, I yearn for them to have a closeness to the culture and the little joys of everyday life that such proximity can reveal.”

Full essay in the comments.