Separated from her best friend in Brooklyn, thirteen-year-old Marisol spends a year with her grandmother in Panama where she secretly searches for her real father. A saucy story of family and friendship, latina style, this book follows the lives of two best friends as their families try to instill in them the traditions of their heritage.

Hearing All the Voices is a tremendous resource for any adult who works with middle school aged adolescents. This work annotates over 500 multicultural books and gives ideas on how to group the books and use the books with students both in and out of the classroom.

Celebrating the wealth of quality multicultural literature recently published for children and young adults, this valuable resource examines the fiction, oral tradition, and poetry from four major ethnic groups in the United States. Each of these genres is considered in turn for the literature dealing with African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native-American Indians. Taking up where their earlier volume This Land is Our Land left off, Helbig and Perkins have teamed up once again to identify and expertly evaluate more than 500 multicultural books published from 1994 through 1999. Both considered authorities in the field of children's literature, the two of them personally selected, read, and evaluated all the books included here. Their insightful annotations help readers carefully consider both literary standards such as plot development, characterization, and style, as well as cultural values as they are represented in these cited works. Each entry also indicates the suggested age and grade level appropriateness of the work. With the proliferation and ever increasing popularity of multicultural literature for children and young adults, this sensitively written volume will serve as an invaluable collection development tool. Teachers, as well as librarians, will find the comprehensiveness and organization of this bibliography helpful as a guide in selecting appropriate materials for classroom use. Even students will find this book easy to use, with its five indexes identifying works by title, writer, illustrator, grade level, and subject. Public libraries and school media centers will find much use for Many Peoples, One Land.

Contains a resource book of multicultural materials and includes program ideas, Web sites, and recommended children's books that provide students with information on the traditions, stories, pictures, and music from around the world.

This essential teaching guide focuses on an emerging body of literature by U.S. Latina and Latin American Women writers. It will assist non-specialist educators in syllabus revision, new course design and classroom presentation. The inclusive focus of the book - that is, combining both US Latina and Latin American women writers - is significant because it introduces a more global and transnational way of approaching the literature. The introduction outlines the major historical experiences that inform the literature, the important genres, periods, movements and authors in its evolution; the traditions and influences that shape the works; and key critical issues of which teachers should be aware. The collection seeks to provide readers with a variety of Latina texts that will guarantee its long-term usefulness to teachers and students of pan-American literature. Because it is no longer possible to understand U.S. Latina literature without taking into consideration the histories and cultures of Latin America, the volume will, through its organization, argue for a more globalized type of analysis which considers the similarities as well as the differences in U.S. and Latin American women's cultural productions. In this context, the term Latina evokes a diasporic, transnational condition in order to address some of the pedagogical issues posed by the bicultural nature which is inherent in pan-American women's literature.

Twelve-year-old Anastasia has a series of disastrous experiences when, expecting to get a job as a lady's companion, she is hired to be a maid.

Eagerly anticipating her Quinceañera, the fifteenth birthday celebration that will signify her adulthood, Marisol is troubled by a lack of money, her mother's new boyfriend, changes in her best friend, and the absence of the father she never knew.