In a city called New York ... In a neighborhood called El Bronx ... The Fernandex children own a very special pet: A white hen named after their favorite Hollywood movie star. A new girl comes to school - a gypsy child who can read palms and foretell the future. A young boy must face the humiliation of wearing his uncle's orange roach-killer shoes to his high school graduation. In the South Bronx - or El Bronx, as it's known to the people who live there - anything can happen. A migrant "fresh off the boat" from Puerto Rico can be somebody on the mainland, pursue the American Dream ... and maybe even make it come true. Here are stories that capture the flavor and beat of El Bronx in its heyday, from 1946-1956. A New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year Finalist, 1976 National Book Award for Children's Literature A Notable Children's Trade Book in Social Studies ( NCSS/CBC )

What elements are present for a body of writing to be considered Latina/o? Through the analysis of nine recent Latina/o novels, Karen Christian melds the theory of "performativity" with the latest scholarship on ethnicity and ethnic literature to create a framework for viewing identity as a continuous process that cannot be reduced to static categories.

Covers numerous ethnic writers and their works. All major American ethnicities are covered: African American, Asian American, Jewish American, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American.

New Strangers in Paradise offers the first in-depth account of the ways in which contemporary American fiction has been shaped by the successive generations of immigrants to reach U.S. shores. Gilbert Muller reveals how the intersections of peoples, regions, and competing cultural histories have remade the American cultural landscape in the aftermath of World War II. Muller focuses on the literature of Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos, African Caribbeans, and Asian Americans. In the quest for a new identity, each of these groups seeks the American dream and rewrites the story of what it means to be an American. New Strangers in Paradise explores the psychology of uprooted peoples and the relations of culture and power, addressing issues of race and ethnicity, multiculturalism and pluralism, and national and international conflicts. Examining the groups of immigrants in the cultural and historical context both of America and of the lands from which they originated, Muller argues that this "fourth wave" of immigration has led to a creative flowering in modern fiction. The book offers a fresh perspective on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Sual Bellow, William Styron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others.

Contains short biographies of three hundred Hispanic American women who have achieved national or international prominence in a variety of fields.

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2023 Book Award During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US’s role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the public. Subsequently, youth literature and media were important tools of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought as a means of negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance. In Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture, author Marilisa Jiménez García focuses on the contributions of the Puerto Rican community to American youth, approaching Latinx literature as a transnational space that provides a critical lens for examining the lingering consequences of US and Spanish colonialism for US communities of color. Through analysis of texts typically outside traditional Latinx or literary studies such as young adult literature, textbooks, television programming, comics, music, curriculum, and youth movements, Side by Side represents the only comprehensive study of the contributions of Puerto Ricans to American youth literature and culture, as well as the only comprehensive study into the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rican literature and thought. Considering recent debates over diversity in children’s and young adult literature and media and the strained relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, Jiménez García's timely work encourages us to question who constitutes the expert and to resist the homogenization of Latinxs, as well as other marginalized communities, that has led to the erasure of writers, scholars, and artists.