Case in Point That the Counting Book Should Not Be Taken Lightly, or At Stake: The Integrity of Chicano/a Children’s Literature

Case in Point That the Counting Book Should Not Be Taken Lightly, or

At Stake: The Integrity of Chicano/a Children’s Literature

René Saldaña, Jr. (author). Carolyn Dee Flores (illustrator). Dale, Dale, Dale: Una fiesta de números/Hit It, Hit It, Hit It: A Fiesta of Numbers. Houston: Piñata Books, 2014.

Yesterday I took a look at a book titled Green Is a Chile Pepper. Today I have before me a book with the subtitle A Fiesta of Numbers. With these and other texts, I cannot help but immediately cringe at the incessancy with which publishers and writers (and other artists) turn to and invoke spiciness and fiestas for the sake of signifying Latino/a cultures. There is certainly a marketing component to this tendency. References to spiciness and fiestas provide different parties with convenient, shorthand tropes for signifying both multiculturalism and fun. Whether this phenomenon is publisher-driven, a matter of authorial inclination, or a combination of both is something that I do not know. But it is a pattern that I find tired, delimiting, and offensive. I find it tired because signification and alignment of Latino/a cultures in terms of spiciness and fiestas has been overdone. It is also delimiting because it tracks both textual representation and authorial imagination in specific directions. Finally, such a tendency is ultimately offensive because it continues stereotypical, reductionist figurations of Latino/a cultures. In a word, then, invocations of spiciness and fiestas in book titles trigger an immediate, in fact familiar concern.¹

René Saldaña’s Dale, Dale, Dale: Una fiesta de números/Hit It, Hit It, Hit It: A Fiesta of Numbers is a bilingual counting book for very young readers. The objectives of a book such as this one include helping children learn to count, introducing or reinforcing (depending on the language proficiencies of individual children) basic Spanish vocabulary, and introducing or reinforcing (depending on the cultural experiences and orientation of individual children) Latino/a culture. Notably, with this last objective, which I have deliberately denoted with the singular form of “culture,” the text ends up contributing to the homogenization of Latino/a cultures. This occurs via the absence of any ethno-cultural specificity. Granted, Saldaña might not have had the space in this book to incorporate such signification, or perhaps he felt it was not a priority in this book for very young readers. In any case, as readers and reviewers we ought to note the Dora-the-Explorer effect that the lack of cultural specification has in children’s texts, namely the construction of Latino/a identity and culture in terms of a flattened-out, singular formation. (This is an issue that arose with Green Is a Chile Pepper in yesterday’s review).

Once Dale, Dale begins, problems only accrue. It opens with the image of a young boy in his bedroom. The balloons that flank him indicate it is his birthday. In both English and Spanish, the text reads, “Today is my birthday, and I am so excited.” When one turns the page, though, one basically crashes into an image of the boy gazing at a colorful piñata. The accompanying text reads, “One piñata filled with candies.” For me, going from the first 2-page spread to the next had a rather jarring effect owing to the abrupt nature of the switch that occurs. At first the text operates in a storytelling mode as it introduces the boy and the setting. Then suddenly, and with no reason or transitioning provided, we see the kid staring, in an eerily transfixed manner in fact, at a piñata. It turns out that with the piñata page commences the counting that will occur in this book. The problem that I found myself running into with this arrangement is that the first pages set me up for a narrative but then with the turn of the page the text launches into counting mode. The absence of any bridging or cuing to signal a switch from narrative into counting mode flummoxed me, and it took me a few moments to re-orient and realize what the text was (unexpectedly) doing.

The lack of a sense of what we are counting or why we are counting only adds to the confusion. The text does not embed into its narrative frame any purpose for counting. In effect it also does not provide a motivation for counting. As the text progresses, it counts off things like “Two hours until the party,” “five wrestling masks,” “seven bottles with bubbles,” and “eight bags filled with marbles.” Eventually the counting culminates with “twelve children ready to swing at the piñata.” But with no purpose set forth at the outset, there is a rather meandering feeling to the whole book.

The fact that the text counts up (as opposed to counting down) feeds such a feeling. When a counting book counts down, there is a clear superstructure as well as a sense of anticipation. In a word, we know where the text is going. This provides an audience with a set of coordinates that provide a sense of progress into and through the text. Moreover, it provides a goal or endpoint. In the case of Dale, Dale, Dale, once the text starts counting up (with no explication, mind you), the reader has no idea for how long the counting will take place (not to mention no sense of what we are counting toward). The whole effect is one of disorientation and aimlessness. At the very least some kind of indication of what we are counting toward would have been useful. In fact, I find myself thinking that a countdown to the beginning of the party (in the vein of “two hours until the party”) with narrative description of party preparations interspersed into the countdown would have been more effective. It would have given a sense of telos and anticipation to the counting that occurs, and it would have provided an alternative to the seeming arbitrariness of what is selected to be counted in this book, which leads to my next point…

To be sure, all of the things counted in this book fall under the umbrella of the birthday party. Thus there is technically thematic coherence. But there remains an unsettling, increasingly frustrating feeling of randomness with regard to what is counted. Partly this occurs because what is being counted does not make full sense. For example, the narrative introduces us to “six tops,” “seven bottles with bubbles,” and “eight bags filled with marbles.” But then toward the end, we encounter “eleven cousins celebrating with me.” As such the numbers simply do not add up. If there are eleven cousins, why are there seven bottles of bubbles and eight bags with marbles? And why are we counting them at all? Owing to these sorts of questions, I found growing within me the feeling that Saldaña and his publisher underestimated, in fact under-respected, the subgenre of the counting book. I cannot help but think that a more effective counting book would have been put together more thoughtfully, more methodically, and more purposefully.

The book eventually arrives at “twelve children ready to swing at the piñata,” at which point the traditional “Dale, dale, dale” piñata song is introduced. Incidentally, this detail suggests to me another possibility for this counting book. It occurs to me that another approach would have been to organize the book around counting down to one piñata (rather than count up from it). If the piñata constitutes a kind of focal point for this experience, such an impression could be conveyed in the book by counting down to it. Such an arrangement would, among other things, then mimic the vectoring of attention at the party toward the piñata by orienting the attention of the narrative and the reader toward it, too. Then we could have the piñata song, which figuratively and literally revolves around the piñata at which the countdown would have arrived. This would have also aligned better with the last page of “And I get to go first, the happiest boy in the whole wide world!”

In any case, even the ending of the book I find disconcerting. Between the opening of “Today is my birthday” and the close of “And I get to go first,” I find the narrative voice an uncomfortably egocentric one. To be sure, someone else would point toward the importance for a child’s self-esteem the importance of having a special day for him/herself. One might therefore protest that a child is entitled to the sort of indulgence that frames Dale, Dale, Dale. I cannot help but feel, though, that the emphasis on individual specialness—in this book as in contemporary childraising practices—runs the risk of overshooting the nurturance of healthy self-esteem and, instead, nurturing an unattractive and problematic privileging of the self. While some might chafe at such a reading of the text and what it portrays, I wonder whether there are ways to recognize a birthday and an individual child in a healthier manner, one that does not perpetuate what Jean Twenge describes in her book Generation Me: “young people have been consistently taught to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves” (72).

Part of what informs my thinking at this point is the fact that the warmest part of the book is the reference to the “eleven cousins celebrating with me.” This moment provides a heartening sense of family and an appreciation for others. Development of the text in this sort of a direction or around this kind of an image could be a way to more safely avoid the egocentrism-breeding effects of the text’s current emphasis on the self.

Finally, as regards the illustrations, I frankly find them more unsettlingly uncanny and off-putting than captivating or fun or even interesting. Carolyn Dee Flores’s images appear to be photographs that have been turned into prismacolor pencil drawings (akin to live action being computer processed in films such as The Polar Express with Tom Hanks and A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey). The effect in the case of Dale, Dale, Dale is a surreal one, unfortunately, that neither facilitates a connection between the viewer and the artwork/text nor invites an interest in the artistry itself. A particularly creepy image is the one that accompanies “five wrestling masks.” Besides the fact that the text provides no narrative reason for the presence of five lucha libre masks amidst these party preparations, the accompanying illustration features the birthday boy striking odd poses in each of the five masks. What I find unnerving is that the poses come across as a combination of zombie lurching and gangbanger posturing. Consequently, this particular series of images seems especially uninviting. That this illustration creates such a presumably unintended impression is emblematic of how the illustrations end up estranging the reader from this picture book.

Ultimately, I find Dale, Dale, Dale disappointing not just because of the numerous problems and concerns I note above, but because, for the sake of the children reading books such as this one and for the sake of the integrity of the genre of Chicano/a children’s literature overall, we need books that do more than just feature a Chicano/a author or feature Latino/a content. Children’s literature in general, and the counting book in particular, are not to be taken lightly. It is a disservice to children and to the field of Chicano/a children’s literature when they publishers and authors prove guilty of such negligence.

--phillip serrato, san diego state university

Notes

¹ All of these issues bring to mind a point that Guillermo Gómez-Peña develops in his performance piece, “The New World Border: Prophecies for the End of the Century:

The Federation of U.S. Republics’ fragile sense of self is sustained by a government- sanctioned transnational media culture that is broadcast via Reali-TV, Empty-V, radiorama, and telefax. Its mission is to transmit an idealized and apolitical version of who we are, but unfortunately, it must contend with rebels who operate pirate radio and TV stations throughout the borderless and still nameless continent.

Still, F.U.S.R.’s experience in overthrowing revolutionary groups has made it clear that the best way to contain rebellion is to offer an easier alternative. That’s why they’re undertaking the current campaign of the amigoization of the North, better known as Operation Jalapeño Fever. This multicultural consumer training project promotes sexy and inoffensive Latino products that range from taco capsules and chili spray to inflatable Fridas and holographic naked mariachis. (36-37)

In the titles of Green is a Chile and A Fiesta of Numbers, we see demonstrated Chicano/a and other Latino/a texts’ complicity with Operation Jalapeño Fever.

Works Cited

Twenge, Jean. Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. New York: Free P, 2006.

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. “The New World Border: Prophesies for the End of the Century.” Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Century. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996. 21-47.